The victor squealed in delight.
William continued moving, never willing to stop, always fearing that to halt would be to give in . . . give in to whatever had taken possession of this battlefield.
He reached an empty portion of the trenches and slowed for a moment, gasping for breath. The sounds continued from all around him. The air was heavy with the stench they had first encountered in the village.
Around a dogleg in the trench, footsteps approached.
William looked to his left and saw a thick, yellowish-green cloud veiling the night sky. He wondered if the forest and trenches were on fire. Perhaps that would be good. Maybe flame would purge this place of all its ills, both manmade and . . . other.
The footsteps grew closer, falling faster.
Dizzy, William struggled to remain standing. His throat burned as pain lanced into his chest. His eyes watered. Breathing became difficult . . . and then impossible. He spat blood; crimson frothed on his agonized lips.
Something raced at him along the trench.
“William!” It growled his name, voice horribly distorted, inhuman.
Then he saw that the thing was Morris, a wound on his scalp bleeding freely and matched by a gash in his side.
“William!” his friend screamed again through his mask, and then he was there, catching him as he fell.
“Morris . . .” he coughed. “Hurts.”
“Gas. They’ve gassed the trenches. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.”
“The Sergeant . . . Winston . . . Liggett . . . they’re dead,” William spat.
“We’re all dead, William,” Morris answered as he dragged him through the mud, away from the cloud.
Through the haze, William saw that his friend’s hair had turned white.
And then he knew no more.
The grass in the meadow was cool. Beads of dew still clung to the green blades. Wetness also coated William’s face as he sobbed quietly, his knees drawn up to his head and his notebook discarded beside him.
“Why do you cry, William?”
The voice startled him. He looked up and saw beauty.
It was the girl from the baker’s, her head surrounded by an aura from the bright sun. Light gleamed from her golden tresses as she sat next to him. He remembered her name now. Clarice. She was . . . had been . . . his girlfriend. How could he have forgotten?
Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, it was all starting to come back. He knew why he was crying. He’d had this conversation before.
“My father is butchering Onyx today,” he said quietly as she took his hand. “I know he’s only a silly cow, but . . .”
“You’ve grown fond of him,” Clarice finished.
“Well, yes,” William agreed. “I’ve looked after him since he was a calf. I can understand why father must do it, but it all seems so bloody unfair. Onyx has lived his life, day after day, never knowing why he really existed: for food. What kind of fate is that?”
“That is simply the way of things, my love,” she answered softly. “There’s too much of the poet in you. He’s just a cow. We raise cattle to eat. That’s why they exist.”
“Is that the only reason?” William retorted. “Aren’t they intelligent creatures, living things? Maybe they have hopes and dreams? How would you feel if you lived your life only to end up on someone’s supper table? It’s not fair, Clarice. Onyx is nothing more than fodder.”
“Maybe we all are, William,” she stated simply. “Come, would you like to see your home?”
“Yes!” William cried. “I’d like that very much. I can’tseem to remember it properly at all.”
They walked hand in hand through the pasture, the roof of the farmhouse looming just over the hill. They passed through a grazing herd of Holsteins.
“Mind the dung,” William warned her, stepping lightly.
Then he stopped, terror rooting him to the spot.
A monstrous bull gazed at him with Sterling’s face. “We’re all fodder, lad,” said the Crown Sergeant, slowly chewing his cud, a bulbous wound opening in his side.
“That’s right, William,” echoed Winston, his teats swollen with milk as he tore ravenously at a patch of grass. “It’s the way things work. We exist to provide sustenance to the planet.”
“We’re germs,” Liggett mooed through a splitting throat.
“I don’t understand,” William gasped.
“Perhaps you are not meant to,” said a voice from behind him.
Clarice had vanished. William turned and saw Morris, buried up to his waist in the soft earth of the meadow.
“The earth still has secrets, William,” he said gravely, sinking deeper into the loam. “Buried forever and never meant to be seen. Not by us.”
“Come, William,” his father cried from over the hill. “Bring the cattle. It’s time for the slaughter.”
Liggett, Winston and Sergeant Sterling began to snort in agony. Then William was sinking into the earth as well, struggling desperately as he watched the tufts of Morris’s hair sink below.
It’s a dream, I know it’s a dream because his hair turned white back at the front.
William opened his mouth to scream and the earth rushed in. Above him, the slaughter began anew.
He tried to scream again, but his mouth was still blocked. Something long and cold was stuck in his throat. It was connected to . . .
He gagged, grasping the thing and pulling the cadaverous fingers from his mouth. Gasping for breath, he panicked when he found he couldn’t move. He turned his head to the right and Morris’s glazed eyes stared back at him, unblinking and filled with blood. A warm and sticky fluid dripped onto his forehead. Something heavy lay on top of him.
Bodies, he realized. He was buried beneath bodies. Muck and water covered most of his form, leaving his shoulders and head above, but the night was hidden from view. The echoes of the artillery blast still ricocheted through his mind, even though it could have been minutes or hours ago.
Something landed nearby with a heavy splash and a grunt, and then, for a few brief moments, there was silence. William held his breath and strained to hear or see, but his world had contracted to this; a claustrophobic stench of fresh blood and turned earth, and a cloying darkness caused by the shadows of the dead. He whispered Clarice’s name . . .
And then something started ripping and tearing at the bodies around him.
It’s time for the slaughter, he heard his father say again.
Something stopped him from crying out. At the time he thought he was being calm and cautious, but later – when he was walking across a shattered, silent landscape with only the dead and unwanted as company – he realized that it was outright terror.
He was frozen stiff by fear.
Animal sounds of feeding, the snap of bones, wet sucks as bodies were hauled from the mud . . . whole or in pieces . . . gulping and retching. And in the background there was still gunfire, still the occasional thud of an artillery shell finding a home somewhere, but it no longer had the sound of a fullblown battle. Now, it was more like a skirmish.
Soon, with the sounds seeming to grow nearer as the thing ate its way down to him, the gunfire ceased altogether.
But the fighting continued. William heard shouts and screams, feet splashing through water and mud, bodies hitting the ground. At one point, he heard the Lord’s Prayer chanted frantically in German. A horrific squeal sent him into a shiver. He clenched his fists and bit down on his lip, tasting blood, desperate to remain still lest the gorging thing sensed him down here.
He realized that he could see it, now. The body above him shifted and jerked as mouthfuls were taken from it. Its head snapped back and crunched into William’s nose. His eyes watered, his face caught fire, but he remained still. He should be playing dead, he knew, holding a breath, narrowing his eyes so that light could not glint from the moisture there . . . but he could not close his eyes because he could see the thing, and the horror of it forbade him any solace.