By the Blood of Heroes (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

BEHIND THE LINES

A
ccording to Sergeant Moore, Strauss had exited the airship as planned and had correctly deployed his MPPGD. He entered a cloud bank shortly after that, however, at which point Charlie lost sight of him. In the effort to get the gliders under cover before they could be spotted from the air by enemy aircraft, no one had noticed he wasn’t with them.

Burke suspected that Strauss had come down too quickly, perhaps even crashing into a bomb crater or an old trench line, and been knocked unconscious, so he sent the men out looking for him. It was in the midst of the search that they discovered another piece of bad news.

Burke was walking along the edge of a series of bomb craters when he heard his name being called. Hopeful that some sign of Strauss had been found, he jogged ahead to where he found Private Williams and Corporal Jones standing atop a small ridgeline. They were looking at something on the other side, and from the expressions on their faces it wasn’t good news.

“Did you find him? Did you find Strauss?” Burke asked as he climbed to meet them.

“Nope,” Jones answered in his usual laconic style, “found our supplies. You’re not going to like it, though.”

When Burke got his first glance at what lay on the other side of the ridge, he knew Jones was right.

He stared down into an enormous crater and estimated it to be at least a hundred feet across and a good twenty feet deep, though it was hard to pinpoint the latter because it was three-quarters of the way filled with brackish water the color of rust. To make matters worse, there was a thick, oily-looking film covering much of the water’s surface, the detritus of too many gas attacks in too short a period. The stuff was clearly toxic, for the edges of the makeshift “lake” were littered with the carcasses of rats, birds, and other small animals.

Their supply crates had come down smack-dab in the middle of it all. Or, at least, he thought they had. Right now all he could see were the two parachutes, bobbing gently in the contaminated water.

“Shit!” Burke swore, once he’d taken a good look.

He couldn’t think of any way to recover the crates. Not with the materials they had on hand, at least. Even if they were able to figure something out, the supplies they needed would no doubt be ruined by the time they managed to get the crates to shore. The crates weren’t waterproof, and from the look of things, the water they’d fallen into was toxic in more ways than one.

It was a setback, and a big one, too. Losing Strauss, their linguist, was bad, yes, but losing those crates was damn near catastrophic, for they held almost all the food and water, never mind the vast majority of ammunition.

He sent Williams to round up the rest of the men and figure out just how much food and water each man was carrying. In the meantime, Burke sat down with the map and tried to figure out exactly where they were. Based on the relative speed and position of the
Victorious
when they had abandoned ship, he estimated that they were about ten miles from where they were supposed to be after disembarking from the airship. That meant that the farmhouse where they were meeting the French partisans was at least twelve, maybe as many as fourteen miles from their current position.

Originally, the plan was for them to land, make their way cross-country to the farmhouse, and lay low until the partisans arrived sometime that evening. Burke would have preferred arriving under the cover of darkness, but he understood why they hadn’t; even the bravest of men would have quaked at the idea of paragliding down from the
Victorious
in complete darkness.

The plan had clearly gone to hell in a handbasket. There was no way they were going to make it to the farmhouse by nightfall, not with a hump of that distance in front of them. Best they could do was get there as quickly as possible and hope the French were still there waiting when they arrived. If they were, the team could resupply and not worry about the gear they had lost.

If they weren’t . . . well, he’d worry about that when the time came.

By the time he’d finished planning their route, the rest of the men had assembled around him at the bottom of the ridge. He explained the situation, and they did a quick inventory of supplies. The corned beef and hardtack the men carried in their personal kits would get them through the next two days, as would the water they carried in their two canteens.

Weapons and ammunition were a mixed bag. Each man had several full clips for his rifle, with Burke and Moore carrying three drums apiece for the Tommy guns. Burke also had the Firestarter and its sixteen rounds of ammo. Jones had been carrying the mortar tube strapped to his pack, but Compton had only been carrying four of its projectiles. The rest were no doubt at the bottom of the lake. Burke wasn’t happy. If they ran into trouble, something that was all but guaranteed given how far behind enemy lines they were, they had enough ammunition to fight back for only a few minutes, at best.

Hopefully, they would be able to resupply once they hooked up with the partisans.

With no sign of Strauss and no way of recovering their supplies from the middle of the lake, Burke made the decision to get the team under way. Staying in one place for too long wasn’t a tactically intelligent move, especially if that fighter pilot witnessed them bailing out of the
Victorious
.

He took one final glance at the map and got the squad moving.

T
he terrain proved difficult to negotiate. The landscape was littered with old trenches and bomb craters, both big and small. The misshapen contours of the ground made travel slow and difficult; Burke half expected one of them to tumble into an unseen ditch and wind up with a broken ankle or leg. They’d been hiking cross-country for almost an hour when Manning gave a short exclamation of surprise and hustled over to the edge of a shallow crater. Jutting out of it were the remains of Strauss’s glider.

Manning was carefully examining the ground at the edge of the crater when Burke and the rest of the squad approached. The big game hunter held up his hand, signaling that they should hold back, and they stopped a few feet away.

From where he stood Burke could see that the glider looked more or less intact. It had a long tear in one of the wings, but that was all. It wasn’t enough to cause the glider to crash, even if it happened in midflight, which Burke didn’t believe it had. It was much more likely to have resulted from a poorly executed landing than anything else.

Manning seemed to think so, too. “The area right around the wreckage is a bit of a mess, but we’ve got one clear set of tracks leading off in this direction. Standard army-issue boot print, so it must be Strauss.”

Burke put Manning on point, and the squad headed off in the same direction as the tracks. They hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before they found Strauss’s backpack.

Or, what was left of it, rather.

The pack had been shredded, its contents strewn over the space of a half-dozen feet. While the rest of the men were passing it back and forth among them, examining the long narrow tears through the tough material, Manning called Burke a few yards farther down the trail and pointed out several sets of new tracks that had converged on Strauss’s.

“Looks like at least four, maybe as many as six,” Manning said quietly.

“Human?” Burke asked.

The other man shook his head. “I don’t think so. At least not after seeing the condition of that pack.”

It wasn’t what Burke wanted to hear, and it certainly wasn’t good news for their missing private. Strauss had a chance against a squad of human soldiers, maybe even a lone shambler or two, but a pack of shamblers was more than a man of his experience could be expected to handle.

Burke got the squad under way once more, moving faster this time, hoping they might catch up to their errant squad mate before it was too late.

Only a few minutes up the trail, however, the late morning quiet was split by a scream of pain. It hung in the air for a moment and then died, too quick for any of them to get a fix on its location.

“Did you hear that?” Williams asked, his voice trembling with tension as he glanced around, trying to pinpoint where the scream had come from.

Burke had, but he’d been no more successful than any of the others in pinpointing the location. He turned in a slow circle, listening carefully, waiting to see if it would come again.

When it did, it was followed by a shouted plea for help.

Strauss!

Manning gestured for his attention, and Burke hurried over to him.

“It’s coming from over there,” Manning said, and Burke took him at his word. The man had been hunting big game for years and was the most experienced in the squad for this kind of thing.

“Lead on,” Burke told him.

Moving as quickly and as quietly as they could, the squad followed Manning as he made his way closer to the source. They hadn’t gone more than another dozen feet before the scream came again, louder, and this time it continued, a long ululating wail that made the hair on the back of Burke’s neck stand up straight.

Manning led them around a series of bomb craters to where some low hills rose ahead of them. The screaming seemed to be coming from the far side, so Manning led them up the low-grade slope toward the top. Near the top he frantically motioned them down to the ground and waited for Burke to crawl forward to meet him.

“It’s definitely Strauss,” Manning told him quietly.

With the man’s screams ringing in his ears, Burke lifted his head up over the edge of the ridge and looked down into the hollow on the other side.

That one glance was enough to sear the horror of what he was seeing into his memory forever.

Corporal Strauss was stretched out on the dirt in the center of the hollow, surrounded by shamblers and screaming in pain as they feasted on his body. Even as Burke looked on, one of the creatures reached inside a large hole in Strauss’s abdomen and pulled out a stretch of intestine before sinking its teeth into the ropelike organ to more of Strauss’s screams.

Burke had to turn away lest he lose what little was in his stomach. Jones came up beside, took a look for himself, and then whispered a horrified “Sweet Mother Mary!” as he, too, saw what was going on.

It was a bitch of a situation, and Burke didn’t immediately know what to do about it. On one hand Strauss was as good as dead already. Even if he survived the feeding, which at this point didn’t look likely, he’d be dead from the infection that often followed a shambler bite in less than a day. It was not a pleasant way to go.

Neither is being eaten alive,
his subconscious reminded him.

Which was precisely the reason that they couldn’t let Strauss continue to suffer.

The problem was the shamblers.

There were at least six of them, maybe more; it was hard to tell with them bunched up around Strauss the way they were. The minute Burke and his men took action to deliver Strauss from his painful misery, they would be alerting the shamblers to their presence. Despite the horror of what he’d been looking at, Burke hadn’t missed a vital fact.

These were no ordinary shamblers.

Their motions while feeding were too controlled, their balance and coordination too fine for them to be average run-of-the-mill shamblers. If they had been, they’d have ripped Strauss’s throat out the moment they’d dragged him to the ground. The way these creatures were intentionally feeding on the nonvital parts of his body, thereby keeping him alive in the process, was evidence in Burke’s eyes that they possessed a rudimentary level of intelligence at the very least, and perhaps one considerably more advanced than that.

Taking action would put the men in danger from the shamblers in the hollow ahead of them, but walking away would earn him the enmity and disrespect of his men, which would probably do more to derail the success of their mission than anything short of getting killed.

Never mind that the shamblers would probably hunt them down if they didn’t deal with them here and now.

When he opened his eyes, he found the men watching him closely. He quickly explained what was happening.

“We can’t just leave him like that,” Compton said, voicing what the others must have been thinking as they watched Burke wrestle with the decision.

“I don’t intend to,” Burke replied, and he felt rather than saw the collective sigh of relief that went up from the men in the group. They knew the potential consequences and still they were willing to take the risk to help one of their own, even if it was just to put him out of his misery.

It was a good sign.

Burke beckoned them all in closer, so he could keep his voice down while he explained what they were going to do. He had no idea how good the creatures’ hearing might be, so he wasn’t taking any chances.

“I’m going to take care of Strauss,” he told them. “But when I do so, we’re going to attract the attention of those shamblers. It can’t be helped; we can’t leave one of our own out there like that.”

There were grunts of agreement from around the circle.