The Sharp End (The Great Undead War prequel story)

  THE SHARP END

  A Great Undead War Prequel Story

  Joseph Nassise

  THE SHARP END

  October 1917

  Near Passchendaele, Belgium

  Lieutenant Michael Burke, 316th Infantry, American Expeditionary Force (AEF), crouched just inside the front door of the cottage that he and his men were using as cover and prayed that German patrol on the other side would just pass by the squat little structure without investigating.

  He shot a glance across the room at his number two, Sergeant Charles Moore, who stood next to the window and was watching through a small gap in the curtains as the soldiers approached the gate at the end of the front walk. The big Californian had already been with the unit when Burke was assigned to command it, but so far the two of them had gotten along pretty well. Charles was a veteran fighter who took the business of keeping himself and those under his charge, including his new lieutenant, alive very seriously, which was something Burke certainly appreciated.

  Moore held up two fingers and the pantomimed taking a drag off of a cigarette, indicating that the soldiers had stopped for a quick smoke..

  The sight sent a pang of envy coursing through Burke; he’d smoked his last two days ago and resupply wasn’t due for at least another week.

  Burked nodded that he understood, then quietly drew his knife, indicating with a nod that Moore should do the same. The other man shook his head, pointing instead to the bayonet attached to the end of his rifle. They couldn’t use their guns; the sound of a shot would bring more of the enemy running. They’d have to wait until the Germans finished their smokes and came inside before eliminating them as quickly and as quietly as they could.

  The others – Corporal Bennett and Privates Perkins and O’Leary – waited in the next room, their own weapons at the ready in case anything went wrong. Burke sincerely hoped they wouldn’t have to use them.

  Moore gave a nod toward the door and Burke tensed. He could hear the two men outside talking between themselves as they approached. Burke didn’t understand any German yet, but the soldiers’ voices sounded relaxed and he didn’t think they were on to them. Probably just checking out the cottage as part of a routine patrol, he thought. Boy, were they going to get a surprise.

  The door opened and the two German soldiers stepped inside, still chatting between themselves and barely paying attention to their surroundings. Burke gave the first one just long enough to clear the door and then he stepped forward, seizing the man by the hair atop his head and yanking the man’s head backward, exposing his throat. A quick sideways jerk of the knife and blood splashed across the furniture and wall in front of him as Burke slashed the German’s throat from ear to ear.

  The sudden attack had taken both of the intruders by surprise and the other German’s arms were just coming up, weapon in hand when Sergeant Moore clocked him across the face with the butt of his rifle. The man folded like a house of cards and the sergeant quickly finished him off with the bayonet. As Burke dragged the bodies out of the way, Moore shut the door and leaned back against it.

  They both breathed a sigh of relief.

  The war that had begun with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was now in its fourth year and there was still no end in sight. The Germans had begun the war with a stunning series of initial successes, driving back the French troops before them as they marched toward Paris with an eye on London as well. Somehow the Allies had rallied, managed to stop and even throw back the German lines, regaining about half the territory they had lost before the war had settled into long, drawn–out stalemate.

  When the Americans joined the war earlier that year, many had hoped it would be enough to turn the tide, but that was not to be. The Kaiser and his armies were more determined than ever to wrest control of the continent out of the hands of the Allied forces. So far they were succeeding. Battle after battle ended with Allied forces retreating in the face of the superior German numbers and equipment. Long days turned into longer months as the casualties grew and the stretch of ground still controlled by the Allies shrank.

  Then British commander Sir Douglas Haig came up with the plan he claimed would “turn the tide of the war” and chose Ypres as the place to carry it out.

  Strategically located along the roads leading to the English Channel ports in Flanders, the city of Ypres had been the site of two previous attempts by the German army to reach the sea earlier in the war. Both times the combined British and Belgian forces had managed to throw back the massive German assaults, though casualties had been atrocious on both sides. A long stalemate settled in by mid–1915 and for the last two years the two armies stared at each other from their respective trenches until Haig came along with his brilliant plan. The Third Battle of Ypres had begun four months earlier, in mid–July.

  The initial assault was preceded by a several–day–long barrage of artillery fire, which only served to warn the Germans that a major attack was imminent. As a result the first phase of the assault, the attack on Pilcken Ridge, produced high numbers of casualties despite ultimately being successful. In phase two, the attacks on the Menin Road Ridge and Polygon Wood also succeeded, but again only at great loss. As a result, three regiments of the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) 81st Division were brought in to support this third, and hopefully, final phase of the assault, which was how Burke and his men found themselves marching through the mud alongside the men of the 3rd Canadian Division two days earlier. Burke’s unit was matched with 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles under Major George Pearkes earlier that morning and ordered to take two key German positions south of the village of Passchendaele, locally known as Source Farm and Crest Farm. The combined Canadian–American force had done so, though it was touch and go for awhile as the Germans fought hard to maintain their hold. Pearkes was injured in the initial assault, but had managed to keep his unit together and take the ground, despite his injury.

  Burke’s unit was then sent forward to reconnoiter the German positions closer to the village of Passchendaele. They were preparing to return to their own lines when the Germans launched a counterattack in the midst of a rain–squall, driving a wedge deep into the Allied position and forcing a general retreat to the secondary line of defense.

  Cut off by the Germans’ unexpected, yet successful drive forward, Lt. Burke and his five man team were trapped on the wrong side of the lines as a result.

  At first he wasn’t too concerned. The cottage they were holed up in on the outskirts of Passchendaele provided shelter from the elements; a situation the men were actually pretty damned thankful about. It had been raining off and on for days and the chance to get out of the mud put a momentary smile on their lips despite their situation. There was even a working fireplace, but Burke forbade his men from using it for fear of the smoke giving away their position. Still, being out of the muck was an improvement and the few morsels of food they were able to scrounge from the depths of the kitchen cabinets raised the men’s spirits a bit and kept their outlook positive. He’d been convinced that the set–back was a temporary one and the Allies would soon throw the Germans back to their original positions, if not all the way into the village.

  As the day grew longer, however, it became clear that the Allied counterattack he was hoping for wasn’t going to happen. Burke and his men were left out on the sharp end with no one to rely on but themselves.

  So what else is new? Burke thought.

  “It’s clear,” he called to the men in the next room and soon all of them were gathered in the kitchen, watching as Sergeant Moore quickly searched the bodies, taking care to avoid the puddle of blood that was pooling
beneath them. He didn’t find anything of interest.

  “Now what, sir?” Private O’Leary asked. His usually ruddy face was looking a bit green at the sight of the blood that was slowly dripping down the wall where it had splashed moments before.

  “Now you stand watch until the Lieutenant tells you otherwise,” Moore growled at the three of them. Bennett, Perkins, and O’Leary, jumped to do as ordered.

  They’d be a good squad, Burke thought, if they weren’t so damned green.

  He turned to his sergeant and, in low voice the other men couldn’t hear, said, “I’m thinking we make a break for it now, before we get hemmed in even worse. Thoughts?”

  The other man shrugged. “Don’t see that we have much choice, to be honest. We can’t stay here now.”

  Moore was right; they couldn’t. Eventually the missing patrol would be noticed and men would be sent out to find what had happened to them. The cottage Burke and his men were holed up in would be searched, the bodies found, and then all hell would break loose. Burke’s squad had to be long gone before then.

  “Good! We’re in agreement. Now we just need to figure out how where going to pull this off. Here’s what I’m thinking…” Burke said as he pulled out the map on which he’d scribbled some notes earlier and walked through his plan with him.

  “We’re here,” he said, pointing to ridgeline marked on the map with only a number, 263, as identification. The position looked down upon the German position to the east, which was why it had been selected as their observation post in the first place. South of the ridge, on the other side of a small copse of woods, was the remains of Vapour Farm, where the 5th Canadian had been positioned earlier. Unfortunately the farm was now in the hands of a German machine–gun crew who were using it to cover the approach to the newly–relocated Allied lines far to the southeast. Between the two was a wide stretch of ground that looked like Hell itself. Artillery fire from both sides had ripped and torn at the earth until the once–gentle farmland looked as if a family of enraged giants had excavated it with their bare hands. Scattered throughout were the abandoned trenches and fortifications that the Allied army had occupied less than a day before, many of which were no longer recognizable as such due to the destruction wrought upon them.

  Then, of course, there were the dead.

  They lay where they had fallen; tangled in the wire, half–buried in the trenches, scattered to the four winds by the destructive power of high explosives.

  Oddly enough, Burke was worried more about the dead than he was about the living.

  He’d heard the rumors, just like every other man in the unit. Corpse gas, they were calling it. Worse than chlorine, worse even than mustard, the strange grey–green gas supposedly had no impact on the living but rather resurrected the bodies of the dead, turning them into flesh–hungry zombies with insatiable appetites.

  At first Burke dismissed the reports as nonsense. He was an educated man; he knew how the horrors of war could affect even the strongest of minds, how they could make men see things that weren’t really there. But then the trickle of reports became a steady flow and Burke began to wonder. When men from battlefields many miles apart began to report the same strange sightings, it was enough to make even an educated man take notice.

  He was just a lowly lieutenant. He didn’t have access to the kinds of information the upper brass had, but he knew he wasn’t the only one beginning to wonder if the higher–ups were keeping something from them. Morale was at an all–time low, one of the reasons Haig had pushed for the offensive in the first place. He wanted to “give the boys something to cheer about,” or so the explanation went. Burke could just imagine how the men would react if the brass were to officially announce that along with the overwhelming numbers of German troops, the Allies would also soon be facing battalions of the walking dead.

  And what about those other rumors? a voice asked from the depths of his mind. Do you believe those, too?

  Burke wasn’t sure. He supposed that if he accepted the notion of corpse gas, then he could accept the idea that one bite from one of those shambling creatures was enough to turn a perfectly healthy man into one of them in a matter of moments. The image of a rotting corpse rising from the mud drifted through his mind and he quickly banished it with a shudder and a shake of his head.

  He refocused on the plan.

  “We head downhill to this copse of trees here,” he said, pointing to the small wooded area directly south of them, “and use that as a staging area to move on that machine gun crew that’s set up inside the farmhouse.”

  “If they turn that gun on us, we’re dead,” Moore said. “Why don’t we bypass the farm altogether, head west, and follow the river back to our lines?”

  Burke shook his head. “With all the rain the ground along the river has turned into a massive swamp. We’d be at the mercy of both the current and any German patrol that happened along. If we stick to ground we’re familiar with, we’ll have a better chance of avoiding unexpected obstacles.”

  Moore agreed.

  “Once we take the farmhouse, we should have a clear shot across no man’s land,” his finger traced a path in front of the farmhouse and across a wide swatch of empty ground that they’d traversed the day before during the initial push, then off the southern edge of the map in the direction the rest of the army had retreated a few hours before.

  “Good enough for me,” the sergeant said and that sealed it.

  By dark, Burke intended to have all of them safely behind Allied lines.

  “Get me the pigeon, will ya?”

  “Sir.”

  Burke watched as the sergeant headed across the room to where he’d left his rucksack and dug through it for the wooden box containing the pigeon. When the other man returned, Burke took the box and together they moved over to the kitchen table.

  Resting the box on the table top, Burke opened it and withdrew one of the little square pieces of paper from the stack inside. He pulled the stub of a pencil out of the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and then quickly wrote out a short message in that week’s code to let the Major know what he intended to do. The last thing any of his men needed was to get shot as they approached the line because the boys in the trenches weren’t expecting anyone except the enemy to approach from that direction. If the pigeon was brought down, hopefully the code would keep the message safe. If not…they’d deal with that if and when it happened. When he was finished he rolled the paper into a tight tube and handed it to Sergeant Moore to hold onto while he prepped the pigeon.

  The automaton was fashioned of tin and, truth be told, didn’t look all that much like a pigeon. Maybe a little, Burke thought, if you squinted at it. It had an oval–shaped body about twice the size of his fist with a slender wing attached to either side, but that’s where the resemblance ended. When the clockwork mechanism inside was properly wound and activated, the wings unfurled and beat the air around them, creating a thrumming sound that reminded him of some giant insect far more than a bird. Still, the name had stuck, if only because the devices had begun to replace the live homing pigeons that had been used to relay messages between trenches since the start of the war. Years of warfare, including clouds of poison gas and relentless enemy gunfire had decimated the pigeon stocks until it was far more common to see one of the automatons than a live bird.

  Burke didn’t care as long as his message got through.

  He reached beneath his shirt and pulled out the key he was wearing on a thin leather cord around his neck. He used one hand to keep the pigeon’s wings carefully clamped against its metal body and used the other to insert the key into a hole at the base of its “neck.” He wound it carefully fifty times, counting the turns aloud so wouldn’t lose track. Over–winding could cause the gears to jam up, an irritating flaw that Burke wished someone would fix.

  When he was finished he had the other man slip the message into the slot that had been designed to hold it on the bird’s belly. Preparations complete, they moved into
one of the bedrooms on the west side of the house, wanting the bulk of the structure between them and the enemy when they released the bird so it would have the best chance possible of reaching its destination. Burke could feel the tension in the wings as they strained against his hands, making it seem as if the bird itself recognized their need and longed to take flight on their behalf.

  Moore stepped to the window and opened it, then pushed open the shutters. He took a quick look outside, then pulled his head back in and nodded to Burke. “It’s clear,” he said.

  Burke moved to the window and gently lofted the bird into the air outside. The minute his hands released the wings they sprang outward and began flapping at a speed too quick for the eye to follow. It hung in the air just outside the window for a moment, looking like nothing so much as an oversized mechanical hummingbird as it oriented itself, and then it took off across the fields with a gentle buzz.

  He watched it go for a moment and then put it out of his mind. It would either get there in time to warn the others that they were coming or it wouldn’t.

  *** ***

  They crept through the trees, edging closer to the farmhouse with every step. It was late afternoon and the setting sun cast long shadows among the trees, helping to mask their approach. They were almost to the edge of the tree line at the back of the property when the stillness of the forest was suddenly broken by the roar of a heavy machine gun.

  Burke hit the dirt, instinctively trying to make as small a target of himself as possible. He recognized the sound of the gun as a Maxim 08, a favorite support weapon of the German infantry, and knew what those 7.92mm rounds could do to a man. A glance to the left showed Perkins and O’Leary face down in the dirt, looking as if they were trying to burrow deeper into the earth as the roar of the gun continued, but to his right Private Bennett stood frozen, his mind seemingly overcome with fear. Burke opened his mouth to shout when he saw Sergeant Moore rise up from the ground and yank Bennett down beside him.