Its mouth was the worst because it was surrounded by flecks of blood and clots of meat. The pale snouted nose leaked copiously over its fleshy lips and chin, diluting dead men’s blood and sending it spraying into the air every time the thing moved its blockyjaws. A second before William finally managed to close his eyes, it sneezed.
Retreating into his own mind – trying to escape, to find beauty in his memories – William felt the warmth of alien fluid spatter across his face and run, slowly, down over his split lips.
He imagined blood gushing from a slaughtered bull’s throat.
He tasted the vile mucus of the creature, the salty blood of the dead men, and the alkaline fear that was his own.
Daylight woke him. If the corpse had still lain atop him, he may well have remained there until his own body weakened and died, cosseted within his own strange dreams. But the dead soldier had been ripped up and scattered. The sun found William’s face and gave him back his life.
He struggled from the loose earth and the body parts that surrounded him, trying not to look too closely. His hands found some horrendous things as he tried to haul himself upright. They were all cold.
An eerie silence hung over the battlefield. There were no whistles or whispers, no crackle of gunfire, no shouting or groaning or screaming from no-man’s land. There was not even a breeze to rustle by his ears. Nothing. And as William dragged himself from the collapsed trench that had so nearly been his grave, he saw why.
Everyone was dead.
Never had he seen human destruction on this scale. The landscape around him was carpeted with corpses, piled two or three deep in places, all of them mutilated and tattered by whatever had killed them. Both armies must have abandoned their trenches to fight in the open . . . but fight whom? Not each other, he knew that. He had heard tales about the Hun, seen caricatures of them before he came to war, but the ones he had seen since then . . . the ones he had killed . . . had all looked exactly like him.
The things doing the killing last night were not even human.
William picked his way between corpses, but it soon became too much to look down all the time. So he strode, arms swinging, every fourth or fifth step finding something soft to walk on. He closed his eyes for minutes at a time, mindless of the danger of flooded shell-holes or barbed wire. He had faced much, much worse.
On the backs of his eyelids he saw perfection, beauty, Utopia: the valley back home that could not possibly be as wonderful and innocent as he saw it now, but in his mind’s eye it was still the ultimate aim for his poor wandering self. He could smell it and taste it, and he could see it as well, every detail clear and defined, every rolling field—
He wondered what might live beneath his father’s farm.
He had to get back to his lines, warn them, tell them there was something here worse than the Hun. He had seen and heard thousands die, but he could save many more if he hurried. There was so little time. It was midday already. He did not want to be out here after dark.
William sneezed twice and spat out a great clot of mucus. A parliament of rooks feeding on a horse’s bloated corpse took to the air.
He wiped his nose with a muddy sleeve. His head had begun to throb and his joints were stiffening with every step.
Damn. After all this, he was coming down with the ‘flu.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS a novelist and screenwriter who lives in north London and Brighton with his wife Paula and two cats. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second, Spares, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in seventeen countries worldwide, while his third, One of Us, was optioned by Warner Brothers.
His most recent books, The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead (aka The Upright Man), were published under the name “Michael Marshall” and have been international best-sellers. He is currently writing a third volume in the series.
Smith’s short stories have won the British Fantasy Award three times, and are collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning More Tomorrow & Other Stories. Six of his tales are currently under option for television.
“I’d been nursing the underlying idea for this story for quite a while,” reveals the author, “waiting to find a way to get into it: I am someone who will watch wacky home video programmes on television and spend as much time looking at the details in the houses, at the hints of other lives, as I do laughing at the people falling over. Then one afternoon I happened to walk past a nice, normal house in our neighbourhood, and I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be odd to just walk up that path, knock on the door and walk in.’
“Thankfully I only did it in a fictional reality . . .”
NEVER BEEN GREAT AT planning, I’ll admit that. Make decisions on the spur of the moment. No forward thought, unless you count years of wondering and speculating – and you shouldn’t, because I certainly don’t. None of it was to do with specifics, with the mechanics of the situation, with anything that would have helped. I just went and did it. Like always. That’s me all over. I just go and do it.
Here’s how it happened. It’s a Saturday. My wife is gone for the day, out at a big lunch for a mate who’s getting married in a couple weeks. Shit – that’s another thing she’ll have to . . . whatever. She’ll work it out. Anyway, she got picked up at noon and went off in a cab full of women and balloons and I was left in the house on my own. I had work to do, so that was okay. Problem was I just couldn’t seem to do it. Don’t know if you get that sometimes: just can’t apply yourself to something. You’ve got a job to do – in my case it was fixing up a busted old television set, big as a fridge and hardly worth saving, but if that’s what they want, it’s their money – and it just won’t settle in front of you as a task. No big deal, it wasn’t like it had to be fixed in a hurry, and it’s a Saturday. I’m a free man. I can do anything I want.
Problem was that I found I couldn’t settle to anything else either. I had the afternoon ahead, probably the whole evening too. The wife and her pals don’t get together often, and when they do, they drink like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem – having a block of time all to myself for once. Doesn’t happen often. You get out of the habit. I don’t know. I just couldn’t get down to anything. I tried working, tried reading, tried going on the web and just moping around. None of it felt like I was doing anything. None of it felt like activity. It just didn’t feel like I thought it would.
I don’t like this, I thought: it’s just not working out.
In the end I got so grumpy and restless I grabbed a book and left the house. There’s a new pub opened up not far from the tube station, and I decided I’d go there, try to read for a while. I stopped by a newsagents on the corner opposite the pub, bought myself a pack often cigarettes. I’m giving up. I’ve been giving up for a while now – and sticking to it, more or less, just a few here and there, and never in the house – but sometimes you’ve just got to have a fucking cigarette. Sometimes the giving up is worse for you than the cigarettes themselves. Your concentration goes. You don’t feel yourself. The world feels like it’sjust out of reach, as if you’re not a part of it any more and not much missed. The annoying thing is that anyone who knows you’re not smoking tends to think that anything that’s wrong with you, any bad mood, any unsettled-ness, is just due to the lack of cigs. I was pretty sure it wasn’t nicotine drought that was causing my restlessness, but so long as I was out of the house I thought I might as well have a couple.