By the Blood of Heroes (36 page)
TOWARD THE ALLIED LINES
F
rom high above, Richthofen’s superior eyesight saw one of the Americans, he didn’t know which, burst from the shell hole and make a run for the Allied lines.
That was the signal he’d been waiting for.
He banked his plane over to the left and headed for the ground in a steep dive.
B
urke saw the strange new shamblers charging toward him across the crater-strewn ground and didn’t need to be told twice that it wasn’t a good idea to stick around and see what happened. Nothing that moved that fast or had that many teeth was ever friendly.
He screamed at Graves and Jones to run for it, then scooped up Williams’s unconscious form and charged out of the shell hole in their wake.
Burke kept his gaze locked firmly on Freeman’s back, letting that be his guide. He concentrated on putting each foot down on solid ground and pumping his legs as fast as he could get them to go.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the British men who were lining the trenches raise their guns to their shoulders, getting ready to unleash a volley. With his arms full, he couldn’t even wave them off.
But when the shots were fired, neither he nor Graves nor Jones were targeted, but rather the pack of shamblers that was closing in behind them. Burke only realized they were that close when the skull of the nearest creature exploded from a well-placed shot, splattering him with gore.
He forced himself to run faster.
R
ichthofen brought his Fokker triplane racing along the battlefield at just a few dozen feet above the ground. He could see the Americans running for safety in the distance, and he had no intention of letting them reach their goal.
In his anger and excitement, he triggered his guns before he was fully in range.
F
reeman reached the barbed wire and spent a few precious seconds searching for a way through the barrier. At last he found it, a long vertical slit that some earlier sapper must have cut in the wire, and he pulled the sides apart and slipped through, doing his best not to look back, knowing that it would only slow him down.
He charged forward the last few yards and threw himself into the foxhole, scrambling for the machine gun.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the approaching aircraft and heard the sound of its guns long before it was in range.
B
urke heard the growl of the Spandau guns and knew Richthofen had returned, but he could only keep his legs churning forward and pray that he would be quick enough to save himself and Williams. The foxhole next to Freeman’s was only a half a dozen yards away now. They were so close . . .
Something grabbed his ankle and yanked him off his feet.
Williams’s unconscious body went tumbling away from him.
R
ichthofen saw the hounds take down one of the Americans and smiled in satisfaction. His eyes gleamed and fury rose in his heart as he came swooping in like the avenging eagle on his personal crest, determined to punish those who dared stand in his way.
His finger tightened on the trigger . . .
F
reeman jumped up behind the Lewis gun, pulled the charging handle, and let loose with a stream of bullets directed at the Fokker triplane as it came across his field of vision.
The bullets slammed into the aircraft directly in front of the cockpit, sending bits of wood and canvas flying away through air, and riddling Richthofen with .303 mm rounds that tore through his flesh as if it were paper.
He watched as Richthofen reacted like any good pilot would do when faced with the same circumstances, pulling back on the stick and climbing nearly straight up in an effort to evade the guns. Freeman thought Richthofen had miraculously survived to fly another day until he watched the aircraft reach the apex of its arc and then just twist over and come speeding back down toward the earth in a completely uncontrolled fall.
The triplane sped downward, faster and faster, slamming into the earth nose first somewhere behind the German lines.
Freeman couldn’t believe it.
He’d shot down the Red Baron!
F
reeman’s timely intervention kept Burke from being splattered all over the landscape by Richthofen’s machine guns, but it also left Burke to deal with the shambler that had seized his ankle and yanked him off his feet.
For once Burke didn’t mind. He was tired of running, tired of backing down from a fight for the greater good of the unit. Now all he wanted to do was avenge the death of his friends, and the shambler in front of him made the perfect target.
Like the shamblers they’d seen feasting on Strauss’s body and the ones Freeman had seen at the testing facility, this shambler moved with far more dexterity and cunning than any Burke had ever encountered. No sooner had it pulled him off his feet than it was scrambling to overwhelm him on the ground, trying to pin him beneath it where it could rake at him with both its hands and feet.
Burke caught hold of the creature’s limb and executed a well-timed judo throw, tossing the creature over him, giving him time to scramble back to his feet before it came charging again.
This time he was ready for it.
As it rushed forward, Burke drew back his fist and fired a solid right hook into the creature’s chin, lifting it off its feet and sending it toppling over backward.
Before it had a chance to recover, Burke flung himself atop it, using his right hand to pin its neck to the ground. He raised his left hand, the mechanical one, and plunged it directly into the creature’s chest, smashing through the rib cage and wrapping his fingers around its spine.
Grinning savagely at the creature pinned beneath him, he tore its backbone in two.
The shambler snapped at him as he climbed off it, still alive but unable to get up with its spine severed in two. As Burke staggered to his feet, he heard cheering and turned to see a squad of British soldiers headed his way, led by Jones.
Gathering Williams in his arms, Burke went to meet them.
B
urke stared at the piece of paper that Colonel Nichols was extending toward him as if it were a deadly snake filled with poison, with the promise of a long, slow death. Reluctantly he took it, doing what he could to summon the nerve to look at what it said.
Word had come in several hours before, but Burke was still numb from the news. Two massive airships, sister crafts to the one Burke had destroyed at the facility near Verdun, had taken off from undetermined locations. One had crossed the English Channel and bombed London while, less than an hour later, the other had moved down the American coastline to do the same thing to New York.
It was his worst nightmare, magnified a thousandfold.
Then Nichols had shown up, paper in hand.
“You’ve earned the right to see this,” he said quietly, handing it to Burke.
It was a signals traffic report, the kind of thing that was routinely used to collect information being relayed from one location to another, usually by telegram. Burke recognized the three-digit code in the upper-right corner indicating that the traffic had originated from the embassy in London and that it had been sent with the proper encryption.
The first telegram was dated several hours earlier.
ENEMY AIRSHIP OVERHEAD. STOP. ANTI-AIRCRAFT BATTERIES INEFFECTUAL. STOP. BOMBS ARE FALLING. STOP.
Burke stared at the words, willing them away, as if by sheer force of thought he could wipe the words from the page and by doing so turn back the clock and keep the horror from engulfing them all. The universe, however, refused to hear his plea.
He knew what the next cable was going to say long before he shifted his gaze lower on the page to read it.
GAS AFFECTING LIVING AND DEAD ALIKE. STOP. WINDS CARRYING IT THROUGH THE CITY. STOP. ALL PERSONNEL ORDERED TO REMAIN INDOORS. STOP. THE DEAD HAVE TAKEN TO THE STREETS. STOP.
Like a horrendous train wreck that he just couldn’t look away from, Burke lowered his gaze to the next cable on the page, the paper rustling in his shaking hands.
CONTACT WITH WHITEHALL LOST. STOP. MAIN GATE OVERRUN. STOP. THE DEAD ARE IN THE BUILDING. STOP.
And then, finally, one last communication. Just a single line with a notation that this one had been sent in the clear.
GOD HELP US ALL.
“We lost contact with the embassy shortly thereafter,” Nichols said gently.
Burke nodded. He didn’t need to be told what happened after that.
Thousands of pounds of gas had been dropped on each city during the attacks, turning untold scores of people into flesh-hungry ghouls. No one knew how many were dead, either in the initial bombardment or in the hours that followed as the creatures spread through the cities.
Plans were being made to destroy the bridges and tunnels leading to Manhattan in the hope that cutting the island off from the rest of civilization might be enough to contain the spread of the creatures. Five million people were being written off, just like that. Burke had to fight not to be sick at the very thought of it.
And England? No one knew what the hell they were going to do about England. London was not so easily segregated from the rest of the country . . .
“There was no way you could have known, Burke. You were there to pull Freeman out, that was all.”
Burke didn’t say anything. In his mind’s eye he kept seeing the name on that massive airship.
Megaera
.
One of the
three
Furies of Greek mythology.
He didn’t have to ask to know that the other two ships had been named
Alecto
and
Tisiphone
and cursed himself for not seeing it earlier.
If only he’d made the connection in time . . .
After several moments of silence he looked up and asked the question he’d been waiting several hours to ask. “Any word on Sergeant Moore or Corporal Manning, sir?”
Nichols shook his head. “I’m sorry. Nothing. But you’ll be the first to know, Captain.”
Burke wondered if that were true.
Two hundred miles away, Dr. Eisenberg stared at the prisoner in front of him. He was a hulking fellow, with the grizzled look of a veteran, and had passed all the physical fitness tests he’d been given.
He was a perfect choice for testing the next phase of the process.
The fact that his injury kept him from remembering who or what he was made his selection even more interesting.
Eisenberg finished setting the dials on the control panel and stepped back out over to his companion.
“Are you ready, Sergeant?” he asked.
The former American nodded.
“Good,” said Eisenberg. “I know this procedure will help you remember some of what you have lost. I’m going to strap you down so you don’t injure yourself while you are in an unconscious state, all right?”
Again the nod.
Eisenberg wondered if the subject might regain his capacity for speech after the procedure as well.
The subject lay down on the table the doctor selected for him and then lay docilely while the straps were secured about his arms and legs.
Eisenberg pretended as if he’d forgotten an important document from his office and excused himself from the room, taking care to lock it behind him.
Returning to the control panel, he flipped a few switches.
In the room on the other side of the viewing screen, a pale green gas began to flow.
Night fell over the battlefield, and the usual flood of rats emerged from their warrens to see what might be available to feast upon that evening.
There were relatively slim pickings that night, for both sides in the conflict had policed their wounded and dead pretty well, removing them from the place of battle. Only those who had died somewhere between the two sides, in the region known as no-man’s-land, still lay where they had fallen.
One particularly enterprising rat wandered deep into the heart of the conflict and was rewarded with the discovery of an entire corpse trapped within a cocoon of wood and canvas. The rat stared at the corpse for some time, debating, and then moved forward on its stubby little legs to sink its teeth into the decaying flesh and feast.
No sooner had the rat gotten close enough to take a bite than the corpse came alive with a jolt, its hand snapping out, seizing the rat in its unyielding grip and squeezing until it could no longer be counted among the living.
The hand retracted back into the shadows beneath the wreckage of the brightly painted aircraft, only to be replaced by the sounds of eating a few seconds later.