By the Blood of Heroes (8 page)

Chapter Nine

FIELD HOSPITAL

W
hen Burke returned from having his hand repaired in Graves’s chamber of horrors, he found he had a visitor. An officer was waiting for him by the side of his bed, cap and clipboard in hand. His uniform was crisp and clean, with creases ironed so sharp as to be dangerous. The shoes on his feet were buffed to a glistening shine, which let Burke know that time at the front was not part of the man’s regular duty. The silver eagle on either shoulder board told Burke he was outranked.

Despite his weariness, Burke snapped up a salute. It wasn’t something they usually did on the front lines, for calling attention to an officer was as good as painting a sniper’s target across the man’s forehead, but they were a bit more “spit-and-polish” back in the rear; given the colonel’s personal appearance, Burke figured the man would be a stickler for protocol.

“What can I do for you, Colonel?” he asked politely, after the other man had waved the salute away.

His visitor stuck out his hand. “Colonel Nichols, MID.”

Burke’s eyebrows went up in surprise. The Military Intelligence Division was a newly formed group within the aegis of the War Department in Washington. It was run by Brigadier General Morrissey, a man who was not afraid to get out and see what life in the trenches was actually like, as evidenced by the Distinguished Service Cross he’d won at Apremont for personally leading a charge against a German machine-gun nest while visiting there. MID’s job was to learn as much as they could about the enemy’s plans and then disrupt them as quickly and efficiently as possible. They’d been operating primarily on the Western and Italian Fronts to date, but even if only half of what Burke had heard about them was true, they were a formidable unit indeed.

Suddenly he was having a hard time reconciling this perfectly uniformed officer with his previously conceived notions of what a visitor from MID should look like.

Nichols didn’t seem to notice Burke’s confusion. “If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to speak to you about the action you were involved in the other morning.”

Burke glanced longingly at his nearby bed, wondering what kind of hell he’d catch if he sat down in the colonel’s presence without permission, and then decided he really didn’t care and did it anyway. He was a patient, after all.
What were they going to do? Send him back to the front?
They’d already ordered him to return there as soon as he was fit to do so.

“What do you want to know?” Burke asked.

The colonel raised an eyebrow at his departure from protocol, but didn’t pursue the issue. “Your report mentioned an encounter with a shambler that was acting strangely . . .” he said, letting the question hang in the air.

Burke nodded. “That’s right.”

“How so? What made it different?”

“It was aware, for one.”

“Aware?”

Burke laughed, but there wasn’t anything even remotely amused in his tone when he said, “The bloody thing changed direction when the block was deployed to protect the communications trench, Colonel. Instead of continuing forward,
it made the decision to turn around
.”

Nichols frowned, which let Burke know the colonel understood the implications of his statement, but the conclusion was one the colonel apparently wasn’t yet ready to accept and he tried to explain it away. “Perhaps it was turned about accidentally when it came in contact with the trench block?” he suggested, an almost hopeful tone to his voice.

Burke would have loved to believe that too, but he’d seen the thing with his own eyes. “It stopped and turned around long before that, Colonel. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I could practically see the wheels turning in its head as it worked to figure a way out of the mess it found itself in. It wasn’t just instinct; it knew it was trapped and it wanted out!”

Nichols’s expression grew more alarmed as he considered what Burke was saying. Burke had stood his ground in the face of more shambler attacks than he could count, and not once had he seen them act with anything resembling intelligent action. Once pointed at the Allied lines, they would simply shuffle forward. There might be a clear path through the barbed wire five feet to a shambler’s left and the stupid thing would walk straight ahead, getting tangled in the wire.

Not only had this rotting sonofabitch sprinted out of the tunneling machine and headed straight for the rear, but it had recognized the trench block as a threat to its mission and had headed for the opposite side when the passage to the left was no longer an option.

Shamblers just don’t do that,
he thought, his own statement from moments before echoing in his head. But that wasn’t all.

“It didn’t move like any shambler I’ve ever seen, either. Shamblers can’t move at anything faster than an unsteady shuffle. That’s how they got their name, right? This thing was different. It came out of that tunneling machine like an Olympic runner right out of the blocks.”

Despite the fact that the creature had once been a living, breathing soldier, Burke couldn’t bring himself to call it “he.” As far as Burke was concerned, it had ceased being human, and therefore deserving of human appellations, the minute it had gotten up after dying the first time around.

The colonel didn’t seem to notice the pronoun issue. He was still trying to find a reasonable solution to what Burke had witnessed, for anything else might change the face of the war as they knew it. “Perhaps it wasn’t moving as fast as you thought it was,” he suggested. “I understand it was pretty touch-and-go there for a while. Are you sure your senses weren’t simply confused by the strain of combat?”

Burke stared at him. He’d been fighting in the frontline trenches for more than three years. He’d lived through gas attacks, mortar bombardments, and wave after wave of shambler attacks. Sometimes all three at once. The idea that he’d be “confused by the strain of combat” was ludicrous and, frankly, a bit insulting.

He let the suggestion hang in the air unanswered.

To his credit, Nichols didn’t turn away from Burke’s aggressive silence, but calmly gazed back at him. When he was certain Burke wasn’t going to reply, he said, “Right. I’ll note that it moved faster than normal.”

He’s just not getting it,
Burke thought.

“Look,” he said. “This thing didn’t just move faster than normal. If that’s all it had done, I’d have written it off as an anomaly then and there and never mentioned it in my report. It was fast, yes, but it was also aware and that’s not something we’ve ever seen in a shambler before. It knew where it was going, waited for the best opportunity to get there, and then actively sought a different solution when prevented from carrying out its orders.”

“So what are you saying?”

Burke hesitated for a moment, then threw caution to the wind and plowed ahead. “I think we’re looking at a new breed of soldier,” he told the colonel.

Nichols nodded, but he didn’t say anything to support or deny Burke’s conclusion. Instead, he asked, “Do you remember anything else that might be significant about this particular encounter?”

“Like what?”

The colonel shrugged. “Did it look different? Smell different? Did it, God forbid, say anything?”

“No, nothing like that,” Burke replied, as a chill ran up his spine. It was bad enough that the thing had acted intelligently. The idea that it might retain the mental faculties necessary to speak made him feel vaguely nauseated as he considered what that would mean for the man the creature had once been. Could it remember who it had been? Be aware of what it had become? He shuddered. “No reason to trust my observations, though. Professor Graves is carving the thing up like a Christmas turkey in his lab as we speak. He can give you more information than I.”

The colonel opened his mouth to ask another question but was cut off when an orderly pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the “room.” He went straight to Nichols, cupped a hand around his ear, and whispered something excitedly. Burke caught the words
Freeman
and
wreckage,
but that was about all.

Whatever was said galvanized Nichols into action. He turned to Burke, thanked him for his time, and hustled out of the room on the orderly’s heels.

What have you done now, Jack?
Burke wondered and then pushed the thought aside, irritated at himself for even being curious. That vainglorious SOB could get himself thrown out of the Air Corps for all he cared. Burke’s years of giving a damn were long since over. Mae’s death had seen to that.

Exhausted from all the day’s activity, Burke settled back against his pillow and let his eyes slip closed. Several minutes later he drifted off into an uneasy sleep in which intelligent shamblers chased him through the trenches of his dreams.

Chapter Ten

STALAG 113

V
erschieben!”

The command to move was punctuated with a rifle butt between the shoulder blades, causing Freeman to stumble forward and fall to his knees in the mud beside the truck from which he’d just emerged. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck violently since being taken captive, and he knew better than to protest. He’d done that the first few times, and the bruises on his face and body were testimony to the fact that they didn’t care what he thought of their methods.

As he climbed painfully to his feet, he braved a quick glance around. They had clearly arrived at some kind of POW camp. A double chain-link fence surrounded the area, and guard towers with visible searchlights were strategically placed to give good sight lines of the perimeter. A cluster of wooden buildings stood to his left, and a German staff car was parked in front of the largest of them, a two-story affair that would have still looked like the French manor house it had once been if it weren’t for the flag of the Imperial German Empire hanging in front of it. Freeman guessed that this was the commandant’s headquarters and personal residence. A set of six low-slung rectangular buildings that reminded him of the makeshift hangars at the airfield stood off to the right. They were in the corner of the camp and ramshackle enough to make it clear that these were the prisoners’ barracks. In between were the usual assortment of buildings you’d expect to see as part of any military encampment—a motor pool, mess hall, workroom, laundry, and workshop.

Directly in front of him was a dirt field, and Freeman could see men working in it, using handheld hoes and shovels to move the soil around. The men were dressed in gray coveralls with the letter K stamped on the back. He knew the K was short for
kriegsgefangener,
which meant “prisoner of war” in German.

Beyond the field, in their own double-fenced section of the camp, stood another set of wooden buildings too far away to get a good look at. Freeman did notice that armed guards were stationed in the no-man’s-land between the two fences, but they were facing outward toward the second set of buildings, rather than inward toward the rest of the camp.

Curious,
thought Freeman.

An elbow struck his shoulder, rocking him forward a step, and he realized the time for sightseeing was over.

“
Verschieben!
” his guard snarled, and this time Freeman stepped forward quickly to avoid the rifle strike he knew the other man was preparing. Three other guards walked along with the one who was so free with the butt of his gun, making it a quintet.

The guards marched him over to the commandant’s headquarters, where they went up the steps, across the porch, and inside to the office just beyond. A clerk sat waiting behind the wooden desk, a bored expression on his face and a lit cigarette in his mouth. Over the clerk’s shoulder Freeman caught a glimpse of another office. That one was much larger and more comfortably furnished than the one he stood in. It was also currently unoccupied.

“Name?” asked the clerk.

Freeman hesitated. The articles of war required that the kaiser’s forces properly record the arrival of all prisoners of war and pass their names and current conditions on to the International Red Cross. That information would, in turn, be relayed to the Allied authorities. On the other hand, he wasn’t just another soldier. His record of eighty-two kills made him not only one of America’s top aces, but a public figure as well. There was a fair amount of propaganda value they could gain simply by announcing he was a prisoner.

Then again,
he thought darkly,
they might just decide to keep quiet.
It was much easier torturing information out of a man everyone thought was dead.

Aware that the clerk was getting impatient, and wanting to avoid another rifle butt to the back, Freeman decided that his notoriety might be more of a protection than a hindrance and took a chance. “Julius Freeman, major, American Expeditionary Force” and rattled off his serial number.

The clerk scratched something on the paper in front of him, consulted a notebook, and then said to his guard, “Put him in C Barracks and assign him to first shift. He can take the place of whoever is selected to meet the commandant tonight.”

His guards led him across the camp to the six low-slung buildings that he’d correctly identified as barracks for the prisoners. There were several men lounging around outside the entrance to one of them, but the minute they saw the guards approaching they disappeared inside.

Freeman’s escort marched him through the same doorway and into the building. While Freeman was still waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior light, the guard behind him slammed the stock of his rifle into Freeman’s kidney and the American flier went down like a rock.

For a moment, all he could see were stars, so great was the pain, but when his vision cleared, he discovered that he was lying on the dirt floor of a large, warehouse-like room. Bunk beds had been erected in orderly rows throughout most of the space, but there must not have been enough for all the prisoners who were housed, for men were lying on the floor in the spaces between the beds, wrapped in thin blankets.

As he struggled to pick himself up off the floor, the other prisoners watched dispassionately. No one volunteered to help him. In fact, there was a definite sense of hostility aimed in his direction.

He was a prisoner, just like they were. What had he done to them?

He found out a few seconds later. The lead guard called out something in his native tongue and pointed at one of the other prisoners. Before the man had a chance to protest, two of the guards stepped forward and grabbed his arms, dragging him toward the doorway.

A collective grumble of protest arose from the other prisoners, and several of them stepped forward, reaching toward either their companion or the guards, perhaps both, an act that proved too much for the guard in charge of the detail.

The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. The prisoner closest to the guards dropped to the ground, dead from the bullet that had struck him below the right eye and exited the back of his skull in a showery spray of blood and brain matter.

As his body hit the floor, the rest of the prisoners froze in place.

Lying a few feet away, Freeman realized that the guards were at a supreme disadvantage. All the prisoners had to do was rush them and they’d be overpowered in seconds. Sure, a few of the POWs were likely to die in the process, but the group would then be armed and they could use those firearms to gain more in the next attack.

But rather than seize the opportunity, the prisoners backed away from the confrontation, doing nothing more than muttering darkly and casting hate-filled glances at their captors.

The prisoner the guards had seized began to wail in French, screaming for the others to help and begging the guards to choose someone else, anyone else, just not him. Or, at least, that’s what Freeman, with his rudimentary French, thought he was saying.

As expected, the guards ignored the prisoner’s pleas and marched back out the door, taking the prisoner with them as they went.

In the aftermath of their departure, you could have heard a pin drop. Several of the men started toward Freeman, and from the expressions on their faces it was clear that they weren’t coming to help him to his feet, but they were intercepted by a short, dark-haired man with a trim mustache.

He didn’t say anything, just stepped out into the open space between Freeman and the oncoming prisoners, glaring in their direction. That was enough to bring the men up short.

The ringleader, a tall solidly built Irishman, said something to the short man that was too low for Freeman to catch. The other man answered in similar fashion, and whatever was said was enough to defuse the situation. The Irishman looked at Freeman, spat on the floor in his direction, but turned away, content for the moment to let the matter rest. His companions followed in his wake.

“Thanks,” Freeman said from his position on the floor.

The mustached man turned to him and Freeman could see a blaze of anger in his eyes as he said, “Do not think for even a moment that I did that for you. Fighting is a punishable offense, and in this camp there are things far worse than death.”

Mustache and the rest of the prisoners turned away, leaving Freeman lying on the floor wondering just how he was going to survive.