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.