By the Blood of Heroes Read online

  A sudden change in the sound of his engine let Freeman know he suddenly had a bigger problem than the presence of the opposition’s most deadly ace. It was barely discernible at first, just the slightest change in tone and pitch, but he was too experienced a flier to not know that it represented a major problem. His eyes swept over the gauges where he immediately noted the change in fuel pressure. One of the attacks by the Albatroses must have damaged his fuel line, something he hadn’t noticed before now. He was about to pay the price for his negligence.

  There was no way he could continue this ballet of motion in an aircraft with jammed guns and a faltering engine and he knew it. He waited another moment, watching, until his opponent looked away for a split second to check on his own aircraft’s controls, then broke out of the spin, headed east in a straight line, praying that the German pilot would take the bait.

  Like a cat with a mouse, the enemy pilot had been waiting for just such a move, and he pounced just as Freeman had hoped he would. As the enemy’s Spandau machine guns began hammering Freeman’s aircraft to pieces, the American launched his own surprise.

  With a sudden turn, Freeman arced his Spad over into what first appeared to be an Immelman turn. As the other pilot altered course to intercept his arc, Freeman abruptly turned, steering directly into the German’s path.

  The enemy reacted quickly, shoving his stick over in an attempt to get out of the way, but his reflexes were not quick enough. The edge of the Spad’s upper wing struck the Fokker’s solitary one. Cloth, leather, and wood flew in all directions as the two aircraft collided and then tumbled away from each other.

  Freeman fought the stick as it jumped in his hands, trying to get his aircraft under control, but with most of the Spad’s upper wing now shredded, his options were limited. He managed to get the plane into a flat spin, using the entirety of the aircraft’s surface in an attempt to slow his plunging descent, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the crash altogether.

  He could see a dark space off to his left and he did what he could to angle the aircraft in that direction, hauling on the stick and hoping that the shadow was a farmer’s pond or a copse of trees, or hell, even a wide hedgerow, anything that might give him a bit of a cushion.

  As the ground rose up to greet him, he prayed the resulting fire would be hot enough to prevent him from rising again.

  There was a thunderous crash, a moment of agony, and then nothing.

  Chapter Three

  TRENCH 479

  As the wave of shamblers poured out of the strange machine in front of him, Burke calmly drew his pistol and began to fire into their ranks. His first shot struck the closest shambler in the face, knocking it backward into the one directly behind it, sending them both to the ground. He’d hoped it might slow the others down, even if only for a moment, but the rest of the horde didn’t even notice as they pushed forward, trampling their comrades into the mud beneath their bare feet as their chilling cries of hunger split the morning air.

  Charlie’s rifle sounded from close by and the two veterans had time to get off several more shots, sending half a dozen of the enemy to the ground, at least temporarily, before the shamblers were too tangled up with their own troops for them to continue.

  At that point there was little choice but to wade into the melee. They had to hold the line; if the shamblers managed to get past his unit and into the rest of the trench complex, there was no telling the damage they might do.

  With his pistol in his right hand and his trench knife in the metal fingers of his left, Burke charged forward. He’d been here before, too many times to count, and his body knew what to do without conscious thought. Shamblers were not only slow, but they also fought without any sense of self-preservation, their only thought the food they saw in front of them. As long as you weren’t overwhelmed, a well-armed man could hold his own against several of the creatures at once.

  He scythed about him with his trench knife, aiming for an unprotected neck or maybe the soft spot behind a knee, the well-sharpened blade cutting through the creature’s rotting flesh with ease. Once he had one of them down, he’d thrust his pistol out and put a bullet through its skull, ensuring that it didn’t get back up again. Within moments he was covered with blood, gore, and the stench of rotting flesh.

  After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, there was a lull in the fighting directly in front of him and he had a moment to survey the scene. The world seemed to shift, everything slowing down, letting him get a good look at the action going on around him, as if he’d suddenly stepped out of time and was looking back in, the details popping out with stark clarity . . . one of his men, openmouthed, screaming his fury as he bashed in a shambler’s skull with the broken shaft of his Enfield rifle; another standing, firing his pistol at the shambler that was latched onto his leg, gray teeth tearing meat from his calf; a hysterical young man cradling the body of another in his arms while blood streamed down his own face as the enemy closed in.

  The arena was pure, unadulterated chaos, the stuff of battle, and to his secret shame Burke felt his heart cheer at the sight of it all.

  This was what he had been born for; this was what made him come alive, what had kept him at the front even after losing his hand in the midst of a battle very much like this one.

  Motion near the strange burrowing machine caught his eye. As he watched, a hatch opened down low in front between the treads and a gray-faced shambler peered out. It was the creature’s very caution that drew Burke’s attention; it should have been charging out into the melee like someone had just rung the dinner bell, not checking to be sure the coast was clear.

  Burke dealt with the shambler directly in front of him by jabbing his knife into its eye socket and twisting sharply, then turned his full attention on the newcomer. He was in the perfect position to watch as it apparently made up its mind and burst out of the hatch at a run. It dogged friend and foe alike as it headed for the opening of the communications trench in a lumbering gait.

  Shamblers can’t run, Burke thought to himself.

  Shamblers CAN’T run.

  But this one could. It was doing a damned good job of it, too, like a tight end who’d just caught the football and was giving it everything he had to get into the end zone ahead of the other team.

  The end zone in this case was the communications trench that ran perpendicular to the one in which Burke and everyone else now stood.

  One of only two such trenches that led into the unprotected area behind the lines.

  That’s when Burke noticed the belt of potato masher grenades the shambler wore around its waist. Wires ran from one device to the next and, seeing them, Burke had little doubt that setting one of them off would detonate all the rest. In the close quarters of a communications shack or a command bunker, the explosion would cause one helluva lot of damage.

  Urgency spurred him forward.

  “The block!” he shouted at the men manning the communications trench, trying to be heard above the din. “Release the trench block!”

  Every trench at the front had one, a wood or an iron frame that was covered with barbed wire and ready to be wedged across the path of the trench to keep it from being overrun if the enemy broke through. At least one man was supposed to be near it at all times, prepared to cut the rope and allow it to fall into place if circumstances required it.

  Except that no one seemed to be paying attention.

  Burke’s cry went unheeded.

  The men in the communications trench were no doubt hunkered down, waiting for their comrades to either defeat the horde in front of them or fall back to the next position behind. This would ensure that a fresh force was ready to take the fight to the enemy if they managed to break through the lines. No one was watching for a runaway shambler and, even if they were, the thing’s speed and dexterity would make them think it was one of the living, rather than one of the undead.

  “Block the trench!” Burke screamed again as he raced after the creature
in front of him.

  There was no way he was going to catch it. The blasted thing ran like hell itself was snapping at its heels. Burke skidded to a stop, raised his pistol, and fired off three quick shots. The first two missed, but the third struck the shambler in the back, knocking it forward off its feet.

  Burke lined up his next shot with the back of the creature’s skull, took a breath to steady himself, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  The rotting thing in front of him climbed to its feet, snarling.

  “Damn you!” Burke yelled. “Seal the trench!”

  The shambler was almost to the entrance, was less than twenty feet away in fact, when someone finally heard him. There was a loud grinding sound and then a massive iron plate covered with a roll of barbed wire dropped in front of the entrance to the trench, blocking the way forward.

  Burke wanted to scream and dance and shout for joy.

  Until, that is, the shambler slowed down and came to a stop. It paused there for a moment, staring at the trench block, then turned to face Burke, clearly making a decision to try this another way.

  They’re not supposed to do that, either!

  Burke transferred the gun to his left hand while he dug in the pocket of his coat with his right, fingers fumbling for the extra cartridges he kept there.

  The creature angled its head one way and then the other, like a dog might when considering something it hadn’t encountered before.

  Burke knocked the breech of the pistol open and began shoving cartridges into the chamber, never taking his gaze off the thing in front of him.

  He’d only managed to get three of them in place when the shambler’s head lifted and it looked directly at him.

  A kind of crafty intelligence glinted in its eyes.

  “Fuck me,” Burke said softly.

  The shambler sprang forward, pushing off with its hind leg like a sprinter and tearing down the length of the trench toward him.

  Burke managed to get off one shot, then a second, both of which struck the shambler in the fleshy part of its chest, but neither did anything to slow it down. He was trying to line up the third and final shot with the creature’s skull when it barreled into him like a runaway freight train.

  He hit the ground hard, the full weight of the thing atop his chest, and the back of his head struck something unyielding behind it, momentarily stunning him.

  He shook his head to clear it, opening his eyes to find a shambler staring down at him with undisguised hunger. Once upon a time it had been a blond-haired, big-boned German lad who had stood a few inches taller than six feet and weighed more than 250 pounds. Now its skin was gray and laced with black veins that stood out against the slowly decaying flesh, its eyes a filmy white rimmed with yellow pus.

  Burke didn’t hesitate; he swung the pistol around and pointed it up into the creature’s face.

  Only to have it knocked out of his grasp by a backhanded blow.

  Trapped as he was beneath the shambler without a weapon to use in his defense, Burke could only watch in horror as the thing’s mouth opened wide, revealing broken teeth that dripped thick, greenish-gray mucus. A shambler’s bite was poisonous, and rescuers had to act fast to save a man if he was unlucky enough to get bitten. The toxins contained in a shambler’s bite spread through the body at an incredible rate, causing a raging infection, crippling pain, and ultimately, death. The really unlucky would turn into shamblers themselves, rising a few hours later once the transformation was complete, though this didn’t happen very often, thank God.

  The creature reared up, drawing its head back like a snake preparing to strike, and then thrust its face downward toward Burke’s unprotected neck.

  Focused entirely on keeping those slavering jaws away from his unprotected flesh, Burke did the only thing he could think of at the time.

  He shoved the prosthesis on his left arm into the creature’s mouth, jamming it between its jaws.

  Burke knew from prior experience just how strong a shambler’s bite could be; his lower left arm and hand had been crushed by one three years before, ultimately requiring his forearm and hand to be amputated. But losing a hand was better than losing his life. This time the creature’s jaws slammed shut on the metal skin of his forearm with a sharp clank, crushing it like a tin can.

  The once-human creature yanked its head to the side, expecting to pull itself away from the offending limb and try again to reach the soft tissue at the base of Burke’s throat, only to discover, to its increasing frustration and Burke’s growing horror, that its teeth had become trapped in the twisted metal of Burke’s mechanical arm.

  For a moment, the two of them froze, staring at each other, and then the shambler went berserk, slashing at Burke’s face with overgrown nails and digging at him with its feet, as it fought to free itself from its precarious position.

  The shambler’s thrashing only served to jam its teeth farther into the tangled mess that had once been Burke’s forearm.

  Meanwhile Burke beat at it with his free hand, driving blow after blow into its hideous face, but it was like swatting an elephant with a blade of grass; shamblers didn’t feel pain.

  Unable to free itself by twisting from side to side, the shambler changed tactics. It beat its fists against the other side of Burke’s arm in furious rhythm, its animal intelligence able to identify the threat but not able to puzzle out a means of release. Each blow further dented Burke’s already damaged prosthesis. If the shambler kept it up for much longer, he knew he’d have nothing left but a piece of flattened steel for an arm and no hand at all. Panic bloomed. Desperate, Burke abandoned his attempts to hit the thing and began looking around for some help.

  Where the hell was everybody else?

  As if in answer to his summons, he suddenly spotted Sergeant Moore rushing in his general direction, a thick black case the size of a sea chest held in his arms like a load of firewood. The case’s weight was evident by the way the sergeant staggered to a stop and dumped the thing on the ground with a resounding thud.

  It had only been delivered to them the week before, and they hadn’t yet used it in action. When he’d first seen it, Burke had laughed aloud. What the hell were they going to do with something like that in the midst of a battle? he’d wanted to know.

  Looked like he was about to get his chance.

  The shambler wasn’t sitting still for it all, however. Unable to free itself from Burke’s prosthesis, the creature apparently decided it was going to gnaw all the way through the mechanical apparatus instead. It was working its jaw in every direction it could while shoving its face forward, its teeth grinding against the inner workings. Oil suddenly spurted free in a long wet arc, splashing across Burke’s face. Half a second later he lost the use of his fingers.

  Another glance in Charlie’s direction showed that he now had the case open and was in the process of setting up the device inside it. What had started out life as a Vickers machine gun had undergone substantial modifications in Tesla’s laboratory. Belts and glass tubing ran over the barrel and stock like creepers in the Deep South, and a big ball of glass sat where the sights should have been. A short-legged tripod supported the front of the barrel and allowed the “gunner” to point it in the right direction. Perhaps most incongruous of all was the hand crank that stuck out the side of the contraption, reminding Burke of the mechanism used to start the Model T Ford he’d owned before the war.

  Before he knew it, Burke found himself staring down the business end of the device as Charlie pointed it in his direction.

  The barrel of a gun had never looked so big.

  A synapse or two must have finally fired somewhere in the depths of the shambler’s brain, for it stopped trying to masticate Burke’s arm and instead simply seized it between its two hands, using the extra leverage to attempt to pull itself free. Burke was surprised it hadn’t done that from the start given the intelligence it had displayed earlier, but he was thankf
ul just the same.

  Burke used the respite to raise his head out of the dirt and look past the creature in the direction Charlie was pointing Tesla’s experimental weapon.

  One glance was all it took for him to understand what it was that had his sergeant so spooked.

  Another wave of shamblers had crossed no-man’s-land and was a dozen feet or so from reaching the edge of the trench. Most of Burke’s men were engaged, fighting off the horde that had burst out of the digging machine, and this new wave of enemy shock troops would provide the reinforcements needed to finally overwhelm the defenses.

  Once they were eliminated, there was practically nothing standing between the enemy and the rest of the division camped out in the rear.

  It would be a complete slaughter.

  “Do it, Charlie! Do it!” Burke screamed.

  His sergeant didn’t need to be told twice. Burke watched Charlie turn the crank as quickly as he could. A high-pitched whining filled the air as the dynamo inside the gun rapidly spun up to full speed.

  Charlie’s fingers reached for the trigger.

  The glass ball atop the weapon filled with a harsh light, and then twisting, churning arms of bluish energy lashed out of the front of the barrel. One arced across the dozen or so feet that separated them to strike the shambler sitting astride Burke dead in the chest, while others snaked past them to strike those in the front of the onrushing horde.

  The scientist from Tesla’s staff who’d delivered the “suitcase” to Burke’s platoon had gone into a long-winded explanation about magnetic fields, opposing charges, and a bunch of other technical mumbo jumbo that hadn’t meant squat to him, nor to any of the men listening to the briefing. But the one thing Burke did understand was the fact that the discharge from the device was supposed to zero in only on nonliving tissue, protecting the troops that might accidentally be caught in the cross fire.