The Sharp End (The Great Undead War prequel story) Read online

  No way…

  Burke fired again.

  And again.

  Every shot hit the Perkins–thing dead on target, the three bullets ending up in a tight group less than an inch apart from each other, but none of them had any effect whatsoever on the undead creature before him. Burke wanted to scream in frustration as the thing continued shambling toward him. It was less than a dozen feet away at this point and he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do if this didn’t work…

  He shifted his aim, centered the barrel of the gun right on the Perkins–thing’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Not believing what his ears were telling him, he tried twice more.

  Click. Click.

  Either the Browning had jammed or he was out of bullets.

  He stared down at the gun as if it were a lover he’d found in bed with another man and then glanced back up just as the Perkins–thing pounced.

  It threw itself upon him, carrying them both to the ground as it shoved its face forward, knocking Burke’s gas mask partially off his face as it tried to reach his throat.

  The gas stung his eyes but didn’t seem to do any other harm, so Burke focused on beating at the creature with his fists, striking it again and again in the face, momentarily holding it back with the sheer ferocity of his blows but knowing at the same time that he couldn’t keep it up forever. He bucked and twisted beneath the dead thing’s weight but couldn’t throw it off of him.

  He brought the hand holding the gun lashing back down, hammering another blow into the Perkins–thing’s head, but the creature ignored it, snatching at Burke’s free hand, instead. It caught the hand between its own, brought it to its mouth with a jerk that felt to Burke like it was trying to pull his arm from its socket, and then clamped its jaws shut on his hand.

  Burke shrieked in agony.

  The pain was incredible; it felt like he’d just thrust his hand into a pool of molten steel and the pain grew worse as the creature ground its teeth together. He pounded at its face with his the butt of the gun while trying to wrench his trapped hand loose.

  The creature ignored his blows; might not have even felt them for all Burke knew. It just kept biting down, inexorably bringing its teeth closer and closer together until with a sudden snap it bit clear through his hand.

  The Perkins–thing reared back, the last two fingers of Burke’s left hand dangling from its mouth for a second before it sucked them inside and swallowed.

  Burke was screaming non–stop now, from both the pain and the horror of it all, but still he fought on, refusing to stop fighting until the very end…

  A trench knife was suddenly thrust over his head and into the Perkins–thing’s eye, burying itself right to the hilt.

  The creature jerked once and went still.

  Sergeant Moore put one foot against the creature’s chest and simultaneously pushed the corpse away while yanking the trench knife free of its skull.

  Burke barely noticed. He was staring at his injured hand and the blackish pallor that was moving in a slow trickle beneath his skin in the direction of his wrist.

  Somehow he knew that the minute it reached its destination the major veins in his wrist would swiftly carry the infection, for that was what it was, he was sure of it, an infection, directly to his brain and his heart. He had a sudden image of his own corpse rising again, becoming the same kind of shambling ghoul that Perkins was, and the vision was enough to spur him to action.

  “Cut it off,” he said hoarsely.

  Sergeant Moore was trying to get Burke to put his mask back on and not paying attention to Burke’s injury. “It’ll be all right, Lieutenant,” he said, his voice muffled by his own mask.

  Burke was not going to be denied.

  “My hand!” he shouted, knocking Moore’s hands out of the way and brandishing his own in front of the sergeant so he could see the changes already taking place near the wound. “Cut it off before it’s too late!”

  The sergeant looked at it, turned away, and then looked back a second time as the full import of what he’s seen finally registered. Behind the goggles of his mask Burke saw his eyes open wide in horror.

  Steadying himself with iron determination, Burke said, “Cut it off, Sergeant. That’s an order!”

  Moore finally must have understood, for he grabbed Burke’s hand, knelt on it with both legs, and pulled Burke’s bayonet from his belt.

  “Look away,” he said.

  But Burke couldn’t. His gaze was locked on the black line that was now almost to the base of his palm, a few more inches and it was all over…

  “I’m sorry,” Sergeant Moore said, then he brought the bayonet whistling downward toward Burke’s left arm.

  Raw instinct caused him to try to pull his hand back at the last moment, but Moore had anticipated that. He was a bigger, heavier man than Burke; the lieutenant’s arm wasn’t going anywhere.

  The bayonet had been designed more as a thrusting implement than a cutting one. It had a blade, and Moore kept his pretty sharp, but it still wasn’t strong enough to take Burke’s hand off with the first blow.

  Nor the second.

  Or third.

  Moore was crying and Burke was screaming as the big sergeant brought the blade down for the fourth and final time.

  Burke watched the remains of his hand leap free of his wrist as if it had a mind of its own and then mercifully all went dark.

  *** ***

  Burke came to briefly some time later; how long he was unconscious, he didn’t know. He could hear men crying and moaning all around him, could smell blood and the stink of internal organs and burned flesh.

  A large shape loomed over him and it took his gas–irritated eyes a moment to focus. It was Sergeant Moore.

  “You’re in the CCS, Lieutenant,” Moore told him, referring to the casualty clearing station where injured men were brought for triage. “The doctor’s going to look at you soon.”

  Burke was swimming in the depths of shock and wasn’t really sure what the sergeant was talking about. He lifted up his left arm, saw the stump of his wrist wrapped in a bloody bandage, but it all seemed distant, removed somehow, as if it were happening to someone else.

  He tried to say something and drifted back into unconsciousness.

  *** ***

  When he came to a second time, Burke found himself surrounded by a doctor and several nurses. A man in a white lab coat stood off to the side, watching Burke intently as the doctor unwrapped his arm.

  Burke still felt removed from it all, but this time there was a slightly euphoric feeling that he recognized despite his injures; someone had given him morphine.

  He could hear the doctor and the nurses talking urgently about his injured arm, but Burke ignored them, his attention locked on the figure of the dark–haired man in the lab coat. Something about him was familiar.

  Thankfully, he didn’t have to think too hard to figure out where he had seen him before, for after a moment the man approached the bed and introduced himself.

  “Lieutenant Burke, can you hear me, sir?”

  Burke nodded. He noted that animation of the man’s face and the fact that he spoke with a slight east European accent that caught Burke’s attention. Austrian perhaps? No, that wouldn’t make sense…

  “My name is Nikola Tesla. You’ve heard of me, no?”

  Again a nod. He was an inventor of some kind, if memory served…

  “The doctor tells me he wants to cauterize your arm, put a brass cap on it, but I’d like to offer you a better option. How would you like a mechanical hand to replace the one flesh–and–blood one you’ve lost, hmmn?”

  A mechanical hand?

  Burke looked down. The doctor had his wrist completely unwrapped and Burke could see the empty spot where his hand used to be, could see the bloody stump lying there looking so helpless against the white background of the bed sheet.

  Why not? he thought through his drug haze. A mechanical hand was bett
er than no hand at all, wasn’t it?

  He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until the sharp–looking inventor answered him.

  “Of course it is, Lieutenant, and I guarantee you will have the best mechanical hand my laboratory can produce. Now just breathe deep and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  As a sharp–smelling cloth was placed over his nose and mouth and a fresh wave of dizziness overwhelmed him, Burke caught sight of the emotion in Tesla’s eyes and recognized it for what it was.

  The burning light of fanaticism.

  He had one last thought – What have I gotten myself into? – and then unconsciousness wrapped him in its soft embrace and carried him gently down into the darkness that awaited him.

  A TIMELINE OF THE GREAT UNDEAD WAR

  June 1914

  Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria at the hands of a Serbian national.

  July 1914

  Austria declares war on Serbia.

  August 1914

  Germany declares war on Russia, then France. German troops pour into Belgium. Britain declares war on Germany. Russians defeated at Tannenburg.

  October 1914

  Turkey declares neutrality and refuses to enter the war. Japan enters the war on the side of its British allies.

  November 1914

  Germans stopped at the Marne. Stalemate settles into the Western Front. Hopes that the war will be over by Christmas quickly fade.

  December 1914

  Germans use zeppelins to begin bombing Great Britain.

  April 1915

  Second battle of Ypres. Poison gas used for the first time in the war.

  May 1915

  Lusitania sunk. America contemplates joining the war.

  June 1916

  First large–scale naval engagement at Jutland. British losses are heavy, but Germany withdraws.

  February – November 1916

  Battle of Verdun. Inconclusive result after nine months of fighting and nearly 1 million casualties.

  July – November 1916

  Battle of the Somme. Allies win thin stretch of ground (25 miles) at a cost of 920,000 casualties.

  April 1917

  America declares war on Germany. American Expeditionary Force sent to Europe to stop the German advance.

  July – November 1917

  Third Battle of Ypres. Germans deploy corpse gas for the first time.

  January 1918

  Allied forces face shambler brigades for the first time at the Second Battle of the Marne. Allies quickly routed as corpse gas bombardment brings their own casualties back to life to fight against them.

  March 1918

  First American aero squadron, the 94th, activated at Villeneuve. Eddie Rickenbacker in command.

  April 1918

  Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, shot down by Allied forces but rises anew as a revenant. Takes command of the Flying Circus.

  May 1918 – November 1919

  Allied forces lose ground in the face of repeated German assaults. Retreat to within a few dozen miles of Paris.

  December 1919

  President Harper gives his now–famous “World Belongs to the Living” speech. Allies rally in Europe while the Kaiser is occupied with the East.

  April 1920

  First use of tanks in support of infantry at the Battle of Cambrai. British troops roll over German machine gun positions.

  June 1920

  Champagne Offensive begins. Allies push Germans back to the Somme, but just barely. Richthofen shot down for a second time, walks away from the wreckage unscathed.

  March 1921

  BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES begins…

  BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES

  A Novel of the Great Undead War

  Joseph Nassise

  CHAPTER ONE

  Trench 479

  The Western Front (1921)

  This godforsaken place!

  Captain Michael “Madman” Burke set aside the trench knife he’d been using to clean the mud out of the clockwork mechanism that powered his left arm and closed the access panel with a firm push. He’d been at it for almost a half an hour, but didn’t think he’d done more than move the dirt from one set of gears to another; he knew he’d need a trip to the rear in order to get it properly cleaned. Unfortunately, he wasn’t due for another of those for at least two more weeks and was stuck with his own meager efforts for the time being.

  Such was life in the American Expeditionary Force.

  His fingers clicked and clanked as he worked them back and forth, testing to see if his field repair would do any good. There was still some resistance in movement, but not as much as before; for that he guessed he should be thankful.

  He rolled down the sleeve of his wool uniform shirt and got up from the camp stool he’d been sitting on. A glance at his pocket watch told him it was time to start getting the men up and ready for the morning ‘Stand To,’ as dawn was less than an hour away and the shamblers wouldn’t be far behind.

  It might be March, but the morning air was far more winter than spring, and Burke knew it would have a nasty bite. He pulled his greatcoat out from beneath the blankets he’d slept in and slipped it on, grateful for the warmth his body heat had imparted to the material during the night. The extra heat wouldn’t last long in the cold morning air, but it would at least ward off the initial chill for a few minutes and Burke had been a soldier long enough to know that you indulged in the little things while you could.

  Helmet and rifle in hand, he stepped out of the makeshift tent to find Staff Sergeant Moore waiting for him, just as he had been waiting every morning for the three years that they’d been stuck here at the front together.

  “Morning Charlie,” Burke said.

  The sergeant gave a noncommittal grunt and handed Burke a tin cup with steam rising off of it. The coffee was weak, they’d been using the same grounds for over ten days now, but Moore had put a generous taste of rum into it and Burke sighed in satisfaction despite the taste.

  “What have we got?” he asked.

  The sergeant shrugged. “Nothing unusual, sir. McGraw’s men reported hearing movement beyond the wire around 0300, but the scouts we sent out came back without having encountered anyone. Probably just more of what we’ve been getting all week, if you ask me.”

  Burke nodded. The enemy had been probing their defenses for six days straight. Never anything too serious, just quick little engagements that forced his men to react, revealing their locations and letting the enemy get a sense of what they would be facing if they did come in force.

  Not if, when, he corrected himself. If there was one constant in this war it was the enemy’s implacable desire for the living.

  So let them come.

  His men were more than a match for any German unit, with or without shambler accompaniment. Lord knows they’d had enough practice.

  The Great War was in its seventh year, but it seemed to Burke that it had been going on forever. He could barely remember what life before it had been like, though he was honest enough with himself to admit that his forgetfulness might have more to do with his own desire to put the past behind him than the length of the conflict. Truth was, after Mae’s death, he just hadn’t given a damn anymore. The days flowed past in an endless haze of gray, one after the other, until he wasn’t able to tell where one ended and the next began. In the end he’d enlisted, not out of some misguided sense of duty or vain quest for glory, but simply to try and feel something again. If he couldn’t feel alive while staring into the face of death, well, then, perhaps he didn’t deserve to live anymore. Of course that had been during the early years, back when a bullet was a bullet and the man you killed with it stayed dead afterward.

  Once the Germans invented that damned corpse gas, everything changed.

  The last three years had been particularly brutal. While the Allied powers had managed to hang onto the small stretch of ground won at the end of the Somme Offensive, it had been by only the thinnest of
margins. Even now the Americans continued to increase their support of the beleaguered French and British armies, sending fresh troops to fill the gaps being carved in the Western Front. As the death toll mounted and the ranks of the opposition swelled, reinforcements continued to arrive; doing anything else could mean certain doom for everything from the English Channel to Moscow.

  The line had held, but only just.

  “All right then, Charlie, let’s get the men up.”

  The two of them began moving in unison down the length of the trench, waking up each man in turn and ordering him to fall in at the fire step, ready to defend his position if need be. And most mornings, that was exactly what was needed.

  A mere two hundred yards separated the two sides, but that two hundred yards of No Man’s Land was comprised mostly of bomb craters, mine fields, abandoned trenches and row upon row of barbed wire, making it some of the most treacherous ground on the face of the planet.

  Recently, the enemy commander opposite them had made it a habit to order dawn assaults on the section of the Allied line that was under Burke’s command. Which meant Burke had to rouse his troops out of their bedrolls every morning, get them assembled on the raised earthen ‘step’ that allowed them to see over the top of the trench, and wait in the chill morning air for an attack that might not come.

  There was a peculiar feeling in the air this morning, a tension that hadn’t been there during the past week. Burke had the feeling that the Germans were done testing their lines; an attack was sure to follow and he sensed that today was the day.

  As the men scrambled to take their places along the line, Burke had a quiet word with each of them. They were good men, though many of them were relatively untrained, having only recently been sent to the front to replace the losses suffered over the last month. He gave them a few words of encouragement, reminded them that the men on either side of them in the trench depended on their actions, and then left it alone, confident that Sgt. Moore would handle any other needs the men might have.