By the Blood of Heroes (10 page)

Chapter Thirteen

THE PIT

W
hen Freeman came to, he found that a guard had a hold of each arm and they were pulling him along, his feet dragging in the dirt. His head was spinning and he felt like throwing up, which was making it difficult to concentrate.

He must have blacked out momentarily, for when he was next aware of what was going on, he found that he was lying facedown in the dirt next to a large piece of iron. A sharp, discordant sound filled the air as the iron was dragged away, revealing a round hole several feet in diameter.

The pit,
he thought dimly.

Even in his dazed state he recognized the pungent odor of death and decay that was rising up out of the ground. He didn’t have long to think about it, though, because at that point the guards bent down, rolled him over a few times to get him closer to the hole, and then pushed him over the edge with a few kicks of their booted feet.

There was a brief moment of free fall and then Freeman struck the floor with bone-jarring force. The guards’ laughter filtered down to him from above, followed by the sound of the lid being dragged back into place.

A bit of light was coming in around the edges of the metal slab and through a handful of holes bored in its surface, so he wasn’t in complete darkness. He pushed himself up on his hands to take a look around and saw that he was sitting in a rough-hewn chamber about ten feet wide with a ceiling about the same distance above his head. Amid the shadows to his left he could just make out what looked to be the entrance to another chamber or possibly a tunnel mouth.

The terrible smell was so strong that it burned his nostrils and cleared his head of the lingering sense of dizziness he’d been feeling. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was able to see that the ground around him was littered with human corpses in various stages of decay.

Here, what was left of a man’s face was sliding slowly off his skull, the empty eye sockets staring back at him as if in accusation. There a woman’s arm thrust up through a pile of rotting flesh in defiance, the fingers of her hand hooked into a claw. Dozens of corpses littered the floor of the chamber alone, never mind the hundred or more that had been haphazardly stacked against the walls and were now rotting together into a giant mound of decaying flesh.

He’d seen his fair share of horror during the war, but nothing that compared with this! He had to close his eyes and swallow hard several times to keep from vomiting.

Many of the corpses were still wearing the remains of uniforms. He could see several different colors; the horizon blue of the French, the tan or khaki of the British and American forces, even the dull gray worn by the Germans. There were a fair number of darker gray jumpsuits present as well, similar in style and cut to his own, identifying those who wore them as former prisoners. It was clear, though, that the dead prisoners were in the minority.

So where had all the dead soldiers come from?

It had been months since there had been a major battle in this area; the kaiser’s troops had pushed the line west to its current location in midwinter of last year. Any remains collected after that battle would long since have rotted away. Yet he could see the corpse of a French infantryman who didn’t look like he’d been dead for more than a week.

He didn’t have time to investigate, however. As he stepped forward, intending to examine the corpse for any answers it might yield, movement off to his left caught his attention. He turned in that direction, only to see the largest shambler he’d ever seen step out of the shadows at the back of the chamber.

It was a good two and a half to three feet taller than he was, half again as wide at the shoulders, and was covered with knots of muscles that seemed to have grown haphazardly out of control like malignant cancers. It was dressed in the shredded remains of what might have once been a jumpsuit, reminding him of the Frankenstein monster he’d seen in one of those new silent pictures a year or two before the war started.

Freeman suddenly understood why the prisoners had feared the pit.

As it stepped into the weak light, he realized his initial impression was wrong. It wasn’t a shambler at all, for shamblers have no need to breathe, and even from across the chamber he could see its massive chest heaving up and down as it struggled to take a breath against the weight of its own flesh. He could also see the pale white cataracts that covered much of its eyes and suspected that it would have a hard time seeing as a result. The sniffing sound that reached his ears seconds later added weight to his hunch.

The creature turned its head slowly from side to side, hunting for whatever disturbed its rest, and Freeman went still, hoping to escape notice, but it was not to be. The creature’s oversized head swung in his direction and seemed to lock in on him like a stream of machine-gun fire. With a roar that shook the confines of the small space, the creature rushed at him.

For something so big it moved surprisingly fast, and Freeman had no choice but to throw himself to the side to escape its grasping hands. He landed amid a pile of decomposing corpses with a fleshy smack and tried to scramble away, but he was unable to get any traction as the flesh of the corpse on which he’d landed simply sloughed off against the weight of his hands and feet.

That was all the time the creature needed. It whirled around and snatched his ankle in one of its oversized hands. Without pause it lifted him off the ground and hurled him across the room.

Freeman flew through the air and slammed into the opposite wall, taking the brunt of the blow on his right shoulder and narrowly missing cracking his head open against the stone. He slid to the floor, dazed and disoriented.

The creature was on him in seconds. It bent over him and let out a thunderous roar, like a gorilla claiming its territory, then snatched him up and threw him again.

Freeman bounced off a pile of corpses and crashed to the floor, his head pounding and his thoughts scrambling. He was in trouble and knew it. There was no way he was going to beat this thing on strength alone; he was going to have to find a way to outsmart it.

The creature began to stalk toward him, its feet crushing the remains of what Freeman now assumed were its previous victims beneath each step, its breath wheezing in and out.

His hands scrambled through the muck, searching for something he could use to defend himself as the mutant creature moved toward him. His heart was pounding and his mind was screaming at him to run, but he knew there was nowhere to go.
There had to be something he could use . . .

Just as the creature reached down to take hold of him once more, Freeman’s fingers came in contact with a long piece of narrow bone. He snatched it up as the mutant grabbed him about the waist and lifted him up, pulling him closer to allow it to get a good look at its prey.

Freeman didn’t think, just acted, slamming the jagged piece of bone he held into the creature’s eye.

It screamed, a long howling cry of pain that echoed in his ears, and then dropped him like a hot rock. Blood was spurting from its face in a bright arc as it stumbled backward, its hands raised as if to pull out the offending material but afraid to touch it, and Freeman cast about, looking for his next move.

His gaze fell upon a long strip of treated leather lying nearby, the kind that might have once served as the strap on an ammo bag or haversack, and he snatched it up, gripping it with both hands and testing its strength between them. It was strong, the leather snapping sharply as he pulled against it, and a plan sprang fully formed in his mind as the creature shook its head and turned to face him. It roared in challenge and rushed toward him for the fourth time, no doubt ready to crush the puny figure that had dared to hurt it.

This time he was ready.

As the creature thundered toward him, he timed its approach, forcing himself to stay still despite every instinct screaming for him to get out of the way, waiting, waiting, and then, at the very last second, he made his move. Ducking under its grasping arms, Freeman grabbed hold of one of the many fibrous growths that covered the creature and swung up on its back, just like a child climbing aboard for a horsey ride. As the enraged creature reared upward, Freeman looped the belt over its head and reared back, one end of the belt in each hand, pulling it against the creature’s neck. He locked his knees into the well between the thing’s shoulder blades, steadying his position and giving him the leverage necessary for what was to come.

The creature might have been big, but it wasn’t stupid. It recognized the threat right away and began trying to reach around behind its back to rip Freeman away from his perch, but its overgrown musculature and warped joints wouldn’t allow it to reach that far back. Realizing that he was out of reach, Freeman reared back even farther and pulled with all his might.

When it couldn’t reach him with its hands, the creature threw itself down on its back in a pile of corpses, trying to crush Freeman with its weight while simultaneously drowning him in a sliding pile of decaying flesh.

The position of the corpses worked in Freeman’s favor, however, dispersing some of the shambler’s weight and protecting him from the worst of the impact. When he realized he wasn’t going to be squashed like a bug, Freeman redoubled his efforts, twisting the ends of the belt and hauling backward against the creature’s thickly muscled neck. He could feel its breathing getting more irregular, as it fought both the weight of its own body and the terrible pressure that he was exerting against its trachea. Freeman refused to let go, determined that only one of them was going to live through this encounter and he had every intention of being the one.

It reared up, trying to get to its feet, but then let out a long rattle and toppled over, lying still.

Freeman kept the pressure on for another five minutes, just to be sure.

When he was convinced it was dead, he let go of the strap and crawled away from the oversized corpse.

Time passed, he didn’t know how long, as he sought to recover his breath and calm the beating of his heart. Eventually, when he thought he was ready, he rose to his feet and staggered back over to the creature’s corpse. He stared at it for a long time, trying to understand just what it was he was looking at, and finally came to the conclusion that it was the result of some kind of experiment gone wrong. It lived and breathed like a man, but had the gray skin and black veins of a shambler. The massive size and odd muscle growths supported the notion that whatever it had been, it hadn’t been natural.

That line of reasoning made Freeman remember his initial thoughts about all the bodies surrounding him, and as he turned to examine the closest of those, the body of a man dressed in the uniform of a French soldier, he received another surprise. The thick black veins pressing out against the man’s skin were unmistakably the sign of corpse gas exposure and infection.

He wasn’t looking at the corpse of a man at all, but that of a shambler.

He turned to another body and discovered that it, too, had been one of the Secret People. So were the bodies that he checked on either side of that. Just to be certain, he got up, slogged his way across the room, and checked several bodies over there.

Shamblers.

All of them, shamblers.

Where had they all come from?

Freeman had been making flyovers of the German lines for years, and as a result he knew that the enemy had their own disposal units for the remains of the undead: men whose job it was to gather whatever was left of the shamblers after each battle and dispose of them in giant bonfires constructed just for that purpose. He’d never heard of shambler carcasses being collected and shipped anywhere else.
What would be the point?
he wondered.

If they weren’t being shipped in from elsewhere, then it was logical to conclude that these carcasses had all come from somewhere right here at the camp.

That’s an awful lot of dead shamblers.

That didn’t make a lot of sense. As far as Freeman knew, shamblers weren’t useful for much beyond pointing them toward the enemy and ringing the dinner bell. They were too stupid to use as servants and couldn’t be trained to carry out even the most menial tasks because of their all-consuming desire to feed.

Yet clearly they were being used for something, given how many of them there were.

He was missing something.

Something important.

Since he was already covered in filth, Freeman grabbed the nearest body without hesitation. He dragged it over to the spot where he’d first fallen into the pit and used the light coming down from above to look the body over carefully.

It had been a young man, somewhere in his midtwenties. He was dressed in a green jumpsuit that looked remarkably like those Freeman had seen the
Geheime Volks
wearing. He stripped it away and then examined the body as best he could for any sign of injury, any evidence that might point to what had killed the man.

He came up empty-handed.

Could be a lot of things,
he told himself. A heart attack. An aneurysm. The wrong kind of chemical exposure. Maybe even poison.