As they moved ever forward, words beyond them now, it began to be hard to distinguish-out of the corner of one’s eye-between the monuments and the people rising up behind them.
Creel saw children standing out there-pallid things, waterlogged and puffy, mouths opening and closing like those of suffocating fish.
Sergeant Kirk kept everyone moving until they were nearly running on the duckboard.
The sound of their boots echoed off into the still nothingness. Rifles were clenched in hands, stomachs in throats, hearts racing, minds spinning on the edge of madness. A bloated man who was quite naked and distended with gas stepped out of the fog and stared at them with sightless pockets of blood for eyes. Kirk went to his knees in a firing stance and put two rounds from his Enfield into the intruder. The first round made the bloated man flinch, the second made him pop like a balloon, nothing but white goo and clots of bloodless drainage on the duckboard.
They were everywhere now.
Puckered white heads were rising from flooded graves and looking at the men with eyes like black wormholes. Caskets bobbed to the surface of filthy ponds and gnarled hands reached from the mud. The dead were swimming like rats now, propelling themselves through the water and thick weeds with the side-to-side motion of snakes. They glided ever forward, ashen and pitted with holes, serpentine and sleek despite their disfigurements. The woman they had originally seen waited for them on the duckboard, black water running from her mouth and eyes, leaving trails dark as crude oil down her bleached face.
Kirk and Howard blew her off the duckboard with their rifles. The slugs made her seem to implode, to collapse into a tower of squirming pink-gray rottenness that struck the duckboard like an emptied pail of fish guts. Some of it was still moving.
The dead were swarming.
From every sunken hole and muddy ditch and slimy box, they rose and gave a slow, shambling chase, seeming to be in no hurry. They turned maggot-squirming faces the color of newly risen moons in the direction of their quarry and slowly, relentlessly, gave pursuit. They crowded the duckboards, swam through the water, clawed from the mud, emerged from the weeds and from beneath tombstones.
Creel followed behind the others, numb, used up, his mind sucked down into a narrow chasm. Then they were free of the cemetery and the duckboard was climbing a hill and they scampered up over it and saw a ruined, shelled village just before them.
And then Creel’s mind began to work again and he knew that the dead weren’t going to kill them. That had never been part of the plan. No, they were herding them into this place just as they had been compelled to do.
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.