From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (114 page)

"We have to get out of here," I stressed, leaving it as long as I could before making the point. The walking dead men were now star
ting to cross the clearing towards us, closing in, and on their faces was a tortured look of murderous, pure hatred.

Winters nodded.

"Into the bolt-hole."

Winters hoisted Looky up onto his shoulder, and even with the wounded leg, carried him towards the hi
de hole that the now dead soldiers had unveiled to us. I would have helped him if I could, but someone had to watch out for us, and carrying three rifles wasn’t easy.

Once in the hole I rammed the door shut, using several broken poles that had split away
from a section of the wall that was collapsed. Two spades and half of a chair helped to bar the entrance. There was no other exit. It was just a small room, barely bigger than a good sized shed, with three bunks and a small overturned crate in the middle, probably once used as a table. There was a gasoline lamp on the table, still lit, and playing cards strewn all over the floor. The room looked like a makeshift home for maybe three soldiers, two of whom I suspected we had just killed. Where the last was, I could only speculate. I hoped he was one of the ones walking around outside.

I positioned myself opposite the entrance, sitting on the turned-over crate, while Winters hauled Looky onto the bottom of the bunks, before slumping down against them.

And we waited.

The first thud on the door came maybe a minute later, but it seemed like a lifetime. The door jarred only slightly, the spades and shafts of broken pole taking most of the blow. I got the distinct impression that whatever was hitting the other side o
f that door was neither alive nor very strong. With each thud came that familiar cracking sound as the cadaver’s bones collapsed inside its dead shell.

It puzzles me why the bones of these newly departed, but walking, corpses, were so brittle. They did mov
e in a very strange fashion, so maybe that was the reason. That was my guess at least, that every move they took, every step forced upon the dead bodies by whatever strange and godforsaken thing that now inhabited them, was against the natural movement of a man. I think they shuffled in whatever manner they would have done in their previous bodies. It seems the only rational excuse I can think of.

Soon the single pounding of a fist or foot became many, until the door was nearly shaking on its roughly made h
inges. I prepared for the worst, for the moment where my three magazines of bullets, whatever Winters had left, and the remaining rounds that our trigger-happy friend Looky had left, would be the only thing prolonging the time I spent on this earth. I settled myself, even at that young age, to be ready to face the almighty and try to account for my sins. That thought scared me.

But it never came.

A few minutes later, just as the last of the gas ran out in the lantern, and darkness came upon us, the pounding stopped. The door still barely held firm.

I waited for a few minutes before creeping to the door, to take a look through one of the cracks that had formed during the assault. In my thoughts I could hear Looky telling me to wait up, give it more time. But
I was always impatient, and was soon looking through one of the thin hairline cracks, out into the light of the day. One more pound on that door and I would have taken it full in the face, and Looky was no longer alive to tell me to do otherwise.

Outside I
could see them all, walking away back down the slope, towards the maze of trenches that wound all the way to the bottom of the hill, where only a few collapsed walls breached the twenty-foot jagged drop that separated the hill from the muddy flatlands pocked with shell craters.

As I watched, they slowly disappeared one by one into the shadows and the mist that gathered down the slope, until there was but one figure left.

He was a tall man. I hadn’t noticed him before, standing motionless and looking up the hill as the dead men walked past him. I was about to go back into the shadows, give them more time to disperse, and hope that soon my fellow soldiers would come storming up the hill, to liberate what we had already liberated, when he walked up the muddy path about halfway, so I could just see his face, glaring almost into my soul, and directly into my eyes, and spoke.

"All will be accounted for," he bellowed, his voice raspy and thick, choking to
force the sound out of vocal cords that I really don’t believe were made for that tone.

So it came to it. The thing that has haunted me for so many years in my dreams. That face.

His one good eye was no more human than seeing the night sky staring back down at you, an endless hole of darkness that gave not a speck of light. It was almost as though someone had pushed them back into his head, like they were made of putty, the skin around the sockets dry and black. His skull was twisted somehow and elongated, and a scar that must have been an inch deep, ran straight down the other side of his face. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw small sharp pieces of bone jutting out from the crevice, like spines, or even teeth.

He stopped about halfway across the cle
aring and repeated those same words again - "All will be accounted for," though this time I wasn’t sure if he said the words out loud, or I just heard them in my head. Either way, he didn’t wait around. His face, for a moment, betrayed a look of what I thought might be fear. He had spotted something he didn’t like, spun on his heals, and paced back down the path to disappear into the mist after the throng of dead men.

The second strange figure to come into view appeared before the door, dropping down from
the mud verge that my hiding place was burrowed into. His boots made a dull thud as he landed in the mud, his legs bending sharply at the knees, bracing against the impact of the drop.

But this didn
’t slow him down. No, he paced across the clearing and followed the direction of the scar-faced man into the mist, and in moments he had also vanished.

Unbelievably, this man was more imposing than the gaunt, alien-looking first one. He was strongly built, his shoulders and arms bulked out from under his dark, wo
rn garments. In his right hand he carried a weapon that I had not seen before, a rifle that looked similar to my own, but was constructed of a black metallic material - no wooden shaft or butt adorned this weapon. The magazine that stuck out from the bottom was bulky and long, maybe ten inches jutted out from the main body, curved forward in a strange arc.

Just before this second stranger disappeared from view into the mist, he took one sharp glance backwards, also looking straight at me. His features were
pale, but not scarred, and he looked young, maybe only a few years older than me, but something in that alert glance told me that there were more years of experience in them than I would see in my entire lifetime.

He vanished from view, his long cloak flap
ping behind him for a moment before following him into the gloom. I sat there stunned, unsure of what I had just witnessed, confused, and scared as hell.

That day in the trenches was to be my last. As I staggered out of the bolt-hole about an hour later to greet the refreshing sight of allied troops heading up the slope, I found the third and last soldier who had lived in the hole. He had been in there wit
h us all along, tucked under the bottom bunk, in a tiny space that a man could barely squeeze, quietly waiting for a time to leave safely. I can only presume that when he followed me out and saw the number of approaching enemy troops he gave up all hopes of escape, and resigned himself to death. But he wasn’t going to go without a fight.

The bullet took me straight between the shoulder blades, and it was by luck alone that it missed every vital part of my body, barely chipping my spine. It exited out the fr
ont just below my collar bone, taking with it just a few small pieces of bone and muscle.

Moments before, I had been sitting, gazing down at almost that same spot, as I realised that not just Looky had died in that bolt-hole. The bullet that Winters had ta
ken in the top of his leg must have hit an artery or something, because while I had sat there, guarding the door, he had slowly and quietly bled to death behind me, leaning against the bunk, his arm across the chest of his best friend. Although it saddened me to lose them both, I think it was fitting that they had died together, if they had to die at all. There wasn’t a part of their world that hadn’t involved the other one.

Now, do you remember how I was saying that most of the time folks would just pass you by, ignoring you, stuck in their own little world of problems, yet there were occasionally the odd one or two that were different?

Well, I met one of those folks in a field hospital about ten miles from the trenches, where I went to after that day on t
he hill. I was so glad to see that hill disappear from view, bu at the same time sad because of those I had left behind.

Between waking up in a field hospital, on a rough bed that I think was just there for me to die on, lying there in pain for a week befo
re I was able to at least breathe without crying out in pain, and being shipped off back to England, conditionally discharged because of injury, I never saw those two old boys again. It’s one of the things, and believe me there are many, that I truly regret in my life. Not knowing where they were laid to rest.

I made a remarkable recovery, the doctors told me. All they had done was clean the wound as well as they could and then stitch up the holes. I guess with that kind of injury, the most they could do w
as patch me up and hope. The doctors didn’t promise me anything, saying that if I was strong, and rested, I might make it through. Of course, as I already mentioned, the wound was superficial. I didn't have to recover from much, except maybe the shock.

Soo
n I was bandaged up and hobbling around the sprawl of field tents, running minor errands for the staff. Nothing strenuous, that wasn’t allowed, mostly it was just taking papers and messages backwards and forwards around the various parts of the camp. After a while, when I had gained the trust of many of the doctors in the hospital, they started asking me to take medical supplies.

It was simple. One of the doctors would tell me they needed such and such in one of the tents, which I would duly write down on a
little notepad that I had acquired, and then waddle over to the stores shed, give them my list, and take them to wherever they were needed. Sometimes it was a cure, and sometimes it was, well, just something to ease the pain of passing.

That was how I met
Joe Dean.

Born Joseph Henry Dean, 1885 in Brady, Texas, a place he claimed was the very heart of that county, and the soul of America. He told me how his fathers were the founders of the town. Well, I
’m not sure I believed him, but Joe had a way of telling stories, there was something about his nature that just made you smile.

When I first saw him, he was looking sorry for himself, lying in one of the tents on the northern side of the camp, next to a man dying of tuberculosis. I was taking a bag of medical
supplies over to the nurse who was attending that poor man. Don’t ask me what they were, because I just did as I was asked.

Joe had the deepest Texan drawl you
’d ever hear. I had met a lot of Americans in the camp, along with many folk of all nationalities, and I had difficulty telling one American accent from the other, but Joe’s voice was so distinct that there was no mistaking where he came from.

I walked in, carrying my satchel full of bags and bottles, took one look around, and headed over to the nurs
e on the far side of the tent. I made it about halfway across before he spoke.

"Hey pal, you got any water in that schoolbag?"

As it happened I did, and he took it and drank down about a half before I could stop him, a whole lot of it spilling down his front and onto the bed, but he didn’t seem to mind.

"You
’re a lifesaver. They don’t look after us so good up here."

The nurse overheard him speaking and walked over to meet me.

"You giving this young man a hard time Joseph?" she said, with a look of mock disapproval on her face.

"I was just getting me some water, goddamn it, you see what I mean?"

The nurse was an older woman, maybe in her late forties, and still looking fine for her age. She glanced at me and frowned.

"Are you the man delivering my medicines?"

I nodded.

"Then come along, and don
’t you listen to that old soldier, he’s all mouth."

I followed her over to a table on the far side of the tent, listening to Joe cursing all the way.

"Hey I’m a wounded man here, a bit of respect wouldn’t go amiss now."

"Joseph Dean, you shut your chirping up now, there are men here that need more help than you do."

She looked at me, and shook her head as Joe continued to curse over in the corner, albeit a little quieter.

"Just ignore him. He
’s harmless enough, but he doesn’t like it when he’s not getting the attention."

After I had handed over my delivery I started to walk back out of the tent, past where Joe was lying, still complaining to himself about his treatment at the hands of his so called persecutors. Anyone else
would have looked like a self-pitying fool, but his tone said something different.