By the Blood of Heroes Page 4

  Burke prayed they’d gotten it right.

  And, in those first few seconds, it looked like they had. A web of twisting electrical balefire spread across the shambler’s entire form, outlining him in a blue light that sparked and popped with a life of its own.

  A grin began to slide across Burke’s face as he watched the thing shake and twist under the power of the beam.

  The grin swiftly vanished when one of those twisting bands of energy jumped from the creature’s face to the arm that was still trapped inside its mouth.

  Burke’s metal arm.

  A bolt of power shot down the length of his prosthesis and exploded across the cluster of dead nerve endings in the stump of his elbow, making his arm twist and jerk from the pain.

  As they both danced to the energy coursing between them, Burke thought he saw a dead man’s smile on the shambler before he was shocked into unconsciousness.

  Chapter Four

  JASTA 11

  With a plume of black smoke spilling from beneath his engine cowling and his left wing vibrating hard enough to beat the devil, Baron Manfred von Richthofen carefully nursed his dying Fokker D.VIII toward the airfield that was just coming into view in the distance.

  Failing at this point would be more a blow to his pride than anything else. He had little doubt that he’d live through a crash; after all, his altered form had allowed him to do so twice already and from heights far greater than this. But the thought of crashing within sight of his own airfield, and the resulting humiliation he would feel when facing the rest of the Jasta’s pilots later that evening, sent a red-hot fury burning through his veins.

  No one bested him in the air, especially not that ridiculous American playboy, Freeman!

  For months now the American and British press had been comparing the two fliers to each other, and Richthofen had grown tired of the nonsense. Not only was he an officer and a gentleman, but he was also a freiherr, a titled noble in the Prussian Empire! There really was no comparison. Freeman’s “daring exploits,” as the press liked to call them, were examples of poor planning and careless decision making in the Baron’s eyes. If the idiot paid more attention to what he was doing, perhaps he wouldn’t end up in so many difficult situations.

  Like the trap he’d fallen for today, for instance. Richthofen was confident even his rookie pilots would have been able to recognize it for what it was and would have had the intelligence to avoid engaging the “injured” aircraft. Freeman had gotten what he’d deserved, in Richthofen’s view.

  Unfortunately, the damned Yank had also managed to cripple the Baron’s aircraft in the process, which was why Richthofen was doing everything he could to get the dying Fokker back to the ground in one piece.

  He nursed the plane through the last quarter mile and was making his final approach toward the grassy field that served as the takeoff and landing area when a loud WHUMP came from the engine. Tongues of fire joined the billowing column of smoke. The air rushing over the cowling fanned them into flames three feet high, which quickly began to make their way back along the fuselage toward him!

  Richthofen was close enough that he could see the crews on the ground pushing some of the other aircraft out of the way, clearing as much of the landing area as possible in case he should lose control as he brought his damaged plane in for a landing. A flash of anger at their lack of faith bloomed deep inside, but he squashed it before it could spread. The situation must look much worse from their point of view, he realized, with the way the aircraft was wobbling all over the sky due to the wing damage it had sustained, never mind the visible flames now completely engulfing the engine.

  By the time he felt the wheels strike the ground beneath him, those same flames were enveloping the Spandau guns mounted a foot in front of the cockpit in their heated embrace. Richthofen taxied away from the other aircraft as far as he dared and then, as the fire began to cook off the 7.92 mm ammunition in the twin-mounted machine guns before him, he scrambled over the side of the cockpit and retreated to a safe distance.

  From there, he watched in fascination as the flames swept over the aircraft, consuming it like a hungry beast. The sight of the fire caused a wave of fear to well up inside his chest, for fire was one of the few things that could permanently damage his resurrected body and end the strange new unlife he’d been granted, but it took several minutes of effort before he could look away, so drawn was he to the spectacle. The effort left him trembling slightly.

  Disgusted by the loss of another aircraft, Richthofen stalked across the airfield toward the tent that served as both his living quarters and work area, leaving the ground crew to deal with the flaming wreckage. As he approached his quarters, his adjutant, Leutnant Adler, stepped out and snapped off a parade-ground salute.

  “A good patrol, Herr Richthofen?” he asked.

  Richthofen’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the expression on Adler’s face, but he couldn’t find any hint of insolence and so he did what he could to quell his irritation at the question.

  Adler had once been a prime example of excellent Prussian breeding—tall, strong, fair skinned and fair haired—but little of his natural good looks remained after undergoing Dr. Eisenberg’s special procedure. His skin had gone sallow, and his veins stood out in thick black lines. Most of his hair had fallen out; the rest hung limp and lifeless, despite his efforts to comb it over with what little vanity that remained. His lips had thinned, his teeth had elongated, and his nails had thickened into what might almost pass as weapons, if necessity demanded it.

  The procedure was not an easy one. It took a strong man, both physically and mentally, to withstand the crippling agony and mental confusion that came along with it. Those who were too weak or those who lost their sense of who and what they were came through the procedure broken in more ways than one.

  Adler was a “graduate” of the supersoldier program Eisenberg ran out of the secret facility in Verdun. It had been Richthofen’s brainchild, but even he would admit that the program would have failed long ago if it hadn’t been for Eisenberg’s ruthless determination to succeed. It had taken months and literally thousands of test subjects before they had seen even the slightest success, but those days were far behind them now. In the next few weeks, they would reveal what they had been creating in the depths of the Verdun forests and the world would never be the same.

  The war had been mismanaged right from the start, in Richthofen’s view. Not wanting to fight on two fronts, the High Command had decided to strike west with overwhelming force in the hope of taking Paris from the French before their Russian allies to the east could mobilize. Seven field armies under the commands of von Kluck and von Bülow had marched into Belgium in August of 1914, completely confident that Paris would be theirs within six weeks. No one expected the Belgian army to put up such a fierce resistance, nor the series of poor decisions made by General Moltke in early September that had resulted in the German retreat following the Battle of the Marne and the loss of much of the ground they’d occupied. By October, both the British and the Russians had mobilized to help their French allies, and Germany had been faced with exactly what the plan had been designed to avoid in the first place—a war on multiple fronts.

  Still, it hadn’t been completely hopeless. Kaiser Wilhelm might have regained momentum at that point if he’d listened to those who called for a renewed push toward Paris with the help of a beefed-up Army Air Service, Richthofen’s mentor, Oswald Boelcke, among them. It had been Boelcke who had brought Richthofen into the kaiser’s inner circle, and from that point forward the German ace had seen for himself the indecision and fear that were a hallmark of all Wilhelm’s decisions.

  The stalemate might have continued indefinitely if it hadn’t been for the invention of the corpse gas in the spring of 1918. The massive influx of additional manpower had allowed them to push the Allied lines back almost all the way to Paris, and they might have even taken the city itself if the Americans hadn’t entered the war.

 
A fresh influx of American troops, combined with tactical errors on behalf of several German commanders, had allowed the Allies to regain some of the ground they had recently lost. German forces retreated to a line bisecting France that ran from Ypres in the north to Nogent in the south, and there they had stayed for the last two years. Now, at last, they had a way of breaking the back of the American forces. All that was needed was a man with enough determination to see it through; Richthofen knew he was that man.

  The sight of Adler, and what he signified, mollified the Baron’s anger a bit and allowed him to appreciate what he had achieved that morning, ruined airplane or not.

  “Ya, a good patrol indeed. That stupid American, Freeman, has flown his last flight.”

  Richthofen stepped inside the tent, and Adler followed at a suitable distance. The interior was spartan, as befitted the warrior asceticism that Richthofen sought to cultivate amid the rest of the squadron’s pilots. The furniture consisted of a simple table, desk, and bed. The walls were covered with maps of the Western Front, many of them containing notes in Richthofen’s spidery hand. He took meticulous notes of every patrol, placing the most important of them directly onto the maps for future reference. This was the secret of his success, the very thing that had allowed him to rise from a lowly cavalry officer to the head of the most feared aerial fighter unit in all of Germany, the Flying Circus. Information was power, and power was something Richthofen had become very good at acquiring over the years.

  His days of freezing in the trenches and charging the front line atop a Prussian stallion were long over. The cavalry had effectively become extinct in the face of tank warfare and the development of the machine gun. Richthofen couldn’t have been more grateful, either. A chance meeting with Boelcke in October 1915 had spurred his joining the German Army Air Service and his meteoric rise through the ranks to his present command.

  The meeting had changed his life, for it led directly to the circumstances that left him lying dead in the ruins of his Fokker D.III biplane in April 1918. The wreckage, and the corpse it contained, his corpse, had been enveloped by thick clouds of green gas later that afternoon as the German High Command initiated battlefield tests of a new weapon, a special gas that was intended to replace the mustard and chlorine compounds that had been used in the war up until that point.

  The gas had performed far better than anyone expected. Corpse gas had been born and with it the zombielike death troops, the Tottensoldat, who soon swelled the ranks of the kaiser’s army in seemingly endless numbers. Once the German High Command learned how to control them, they became the perfect frontline shock troops.

  But that was not all that had risen anew that chilly April afternoon. In an unusual confluence of events, that same gas had worked its own twisted brand of magick on Richthofen himself, resurrected him as a better, stronger, more intelligent version of the man who had died at Allied hands.

  He had no need for air, for he didn’t really breathe. His body felt no pain and was equally impervious to the weather, be it heat or cold. Even sleep was no longer a necessity. His reflexes were faster, as were his thought processes. Where before he was a methodical thinker, now he found himself making leaps of logic and seeing plans unfold twenty steps ahead, like a chess master, and he’d used that newfound ability to fuel a ruthlessly ambitious rise to the top of the military juggernaut. His unique nature, combined with his hereditary title, had allowed him to move in the highest circles of German society, eventually coming to the attention of the kaiser himself. Sensing a kindred spirit, the kaiser had promoted Richthofen to his inner circle of trusted advisers, never once realizing that he’d just let a wolf in sheep’s clothing loose among the herd.

  Richthofen stripped off his smoke-infused flight suit and undergarments, handing them to Adler, who stood nearby.

  “You are certain it was Freeman?” Adler asked, as he took the Baron’s clothing over to a rack near the entrance to the tent to let the wind air them out.

  The question made Richthofen pause for a moment in the midst of pulling on a new set of clothes. Was he? Had it truly been Freeman?

  He thought so. The plane had been decorated with Freeman’s trademark Jack of Spades, but that alone was not enough to confirm the pilot’s identity. His own little stunt with the Fokker triplane that had lured the Yanks to their death proved that. Still, the skill with which the pilot had flown, the tenacity he’d brought to the task, even the last-ditch effort to ram the Baron’s own plane rather than succumb to the enemy—all that required a rare combination of finesse, skill, and bravery, something the average flier just didn’t have.

  It had been Freeman; he was certain of it.

  But it would be prudent to confirm the kill just the same. Thankfully the dogfight had occurred on the German side of the lines so that shouldn’t be difficult.

  Richthofen got up and walked over to one of the maps tacked to the tent wall. He studied it earnestly for a few minutes, then beckoned Adler closer.

  “We came upon the American patrol about here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map a fair distance inside German lines. “Which means Freeman’s craft went down in this general area.” He circled another spot a few inches away. “I want you to take a patrol out there and find the wreckage. If you can recover the body, do so; otherwise, just take photographs and bring me something we can send to the Yanks to confirm the kill.”

  Adler snapped to attention. “For the empire!”

  Richthofen nodded absently, his attention still on the map, then called out to the younger man before he slipped out of the tent. When Adler turned at the door to face him, Richthofen said, “If you can’t recover Freeman’s entire body, I’ll be content with just his head.”

  Chapter Five

  FIELD HOSPITAL

  Burke awoke to the scent of blood, vomit, and unwashed bodies. Underneath it all was the smell of lye soap, which, rather than hiding the stench, only seemed to somehow magnify it. That was all he needed to know that he was in the casualty clearing station.

  The casualty clearing station, or CCS, was set up in a series of large tents about five miles behind the front lines. If a man’s injuries couldn’t be treated at the front with bandages and simple first aid, he was brought here for more in-depth care and assessment. Those needing immediate surgery received it in a sectioned-off portion of the main hospital tent and were then shipped farther back behind the lines to one of the area hospitals near the larger coastal towns like Boulogne and Calais. Needless to say it was always a busy place, the tents filled to overflowing with the wounded.

  Burke had been to the CCS before, not this one but one just like it, and so he knew what to expect. He’d get a few days’ rest, a hot meal or two, and then be sent back to his unit at the front. Which was fine by him; the sooner he was out of here the better. He hated hospitals even more than he hated the enemy, or the Boche, as they were commonly known among the troops.

  He opened his eyes to find himself in what passed for a private bedroom at the CCS: a corner bed set off from the others by two walls and a couple of tacked-up blankets. A chair stood in the corner, near a shuttered window. The half-drunk glass of water sitting on the windowsill told him someone had been sitting there recently, waiting for him to wake up.

  The blankets gave him some visual privacy but did little to filter out the sounds surrounding him. He could hear men moaning and calling for their mothers, doctors arguing, the endless creak of cot springs under a heavy load, even the far-off whine of a bone saw being prepped for its next victim. All that, combined with the smell of the place, was too much for Burke.

  Screw the hot meals. I’ll be better off at the front.

  He reached out with his left hand, intending to pull off the thin blanket that covered him, and found himself staring at the newly bandaged stump of his left forearm instead. For a moment he was back in the mud and muck of Ypres earlier in the war, watching in horror as Sergeant Moore brought the machete whistling down toward the unprotected flesh of
his forearm, a few inches past the mangled remains of his shambler-bitten hand. Moore’s action had saved his life, had kept infection from spreading through his tissues, but that didn’t lessen the power of the memory. He could hear the mortars going off overhead, could smell the cordite in the air and the mud beneath his feet, could see the grim determination on Charlie’s face . . .

  “It’s not what you think.”

  Burke jumped. The memory held him in its grip for a moment longer, just enough so he could feel the bite of that shining blade, and then it dissolved like rain and he found himself staring across the room at his sergeant’s smiling face poking through the curtains.

  “It’s not?” Burke croaked, not realizing until he tried to speak how parched he was. He waved at the glass on the windowsill and Charlie dutifully retrieved it and helped him take a drink.

  “Nah. Graves took it, that’s all.”

  Burke cringed. Losing his hand to a shambler for a second time would have been bad, but hearing that the ghoulish Graves had taken it might just be worse.

  “Did he say when he was bringing it back?”

  Charlie must have sensed what he was thinking for the big man grinned sympathetically. “He’s not. It was too crushed to repair so he’s giving you a new model. I’m supposed to take you down there tomorrow for a fitting.”

  Great, Burke thought. Can’t wait.

  Something about the man’s utter fascination with the undead unnerved Burke, so much so that he only dealt with him when it was absolutely necessary. He much preferred having Graves’s boss, the great inventor Nikola Tesla, handle any maintenance work that might be needed on his mechanical forearm and hand, but this time it seemed he didn’t have a choice.