Black Hand Gang (10 page)

Nearing the house, he slowed down and edged forward cautiously. He could hear some animal, probably one of those beasts he saw earlier, padding around inside.

From a boarded up window he heard the sound of sobbing, the murmur of prayer and an insistent, urgent whisper.

"Well, we can't just sit here. There must be something we can do."

"What on earth is it?"

"It must have escaped from a zoo!"

There was another roar from the beast, which could clearly hear and smell its prey but couldn't reach it.

Tulliver edged along the wall until he came to a faded wooden doorjamb, its paint peeling and the door long since carted off for firewood. Cocking his pistol, he peered round the door. The huge beast was stood in the passage sniffing at the closed door within. Its great claws had slashed through the plaster to the side to reveal the fragile wooden slats beneath. It wouldn't be long before it got through that way.

Tulliver withdrew. As quietly as possible he checked the chambers of his revolver. They were all full. He only hoped they'd be enough.

He took several deep breaths. He wished whoever was screaming would shut up. It was really getting on his nerves. Apart from which he wanted to make sure the animal could hear him. As the screamer stopped to take a breath, he stepped round the doorway and whistled. The beast looked up and growled before bounding at him, claws skittering over the debris on the floor. Tulliver got off two shots then stepped aside, back against the wall beside the door as the beast came through, bringing half the doorjamb with it. He got off another two shots before the beast realised where he was and could turn. Its back legs skidded out from under it.

It pounced. Tulliver let off the last two shots. One passed straight through its skull scattering its brains out through the exit wound. As he dropped and rolled aside, the beast crashed into the wall and collapsed to the ground, sending loose bricks tumbling down, prompting another round of screaming from inside.

"Edith! Do be quiet. I shan't have to slap you again, shall I?"

"Sister, please, no more violence!" said a man's voice.

"Well, if she don't, I will," came a third female voice.

"Hello?" called Tulliver as he walked slowly down the short passage and tried the door. It wouldn't budge. He tried knocking and was encouraged by the sound of scraping as if someone were moving large objects.

"Well for goodness sake, Edith, give the gel a hand."

"Thanks awfully," came the reply, dripping with sarcasm as the door scraped open and jammed halfway. Tulliver was just wondering whether he should do the gentlemanly thing and put his shoulder to it when a final wrench from a pair of grubby hands freed it. The door crashed open sending a woman dressed in a khaki jacket and long ankle length khaki skirt reeling back into the arms of a middle-aged chap in an army uniform, under which Tulliver could see the black cloth and white collar of a Devil Dodger. Two nurses looked on.

"Careful there, Padre, this is more my area of expertise than yours I think," said Tulliver, stepping into the room and setting the poor woman on her feet again.

"Gor blimey, a... pilot!" said the khaki-clad FANY. She blushed furiously against her better judgement but recovered admirably. "Nellie Abbott," she said with a little bob of a curtsey. "Where's your machine, then? Can I see it? What sort is it?"

"Driver Abbot! A little decorum, please!" said the Sister brusquely. "You
are
a pilot, then?"

"Lieutenant James Tulliver, RFC," he said, clicking his heels and giving a little mock bow of the head.

"Sister Fenton," said the nurse curtly, thrusting out a hand. "Red Cross. This is Nurse Bell," she said, nodding at a similarly dressed young woman.

"Yes," said Tulliver, shaking her hand. "The red crosses on your uniform did rather give it away."

"I don't think this is the time for flippancy, do you, Mr Tulliver?" interjected the Padre.

The young woman in the nurse's uniform, her once carefully pinned hair now a-tumble, let out a sigh and crumpled to the floor.

"Oh, for goodness' sake!" said Fenton, stamping her foot. "Edith!"

"I say, I don't usually have that kind of effect," said Tulliver. "Is she all right?"

"It's not you, you great oaf," snapped the other nurse. "We've just been though a lot, a motor crash, a freezing cold night in a cellar, the shelling and now to have that slavering great creature..."

"It's dead now," said Tulliver. "But this place isn't safe. There are more of them. We'll have to get you into the trenches."

"The trenches? Are you mad?" said the Padre. "There are hundreds of men there."

"Padre, believe me," said Sister Fenton, "The likes of that lot hold no fear for me."

"An' I've got four brothers so I've seen the worst of 'em!" said Abbott jovially.

"There, that's settled then," said Tulliver.

"It's totally out of the question. It's... improper," said the Padre. "We're waiting on a motor ambulance to take them back to the Hospital in St. Germaine."

"Ah," said Tulliver, awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck and feeling the short bristles there.

"What do you mean, 'ah'?" said Sister Fenton.

"I mean, I don't think it's going to be possible, I'm afraid," he said. "At least for a while. Can she walk?" he asked, indicating Nurse Bell.

"Oh she'll be fine. Abbott, give me a hand," said Sister Fenton.

The khaki-clad girl hurried to put herself under the blonde nurse's arm in order to take her weight. The woman groaned softly.

"Come on, Edi," she said. "Time for a little promenade."

"Where to?" asked the dazed nurse weakly.

"Padre, I need to report to, well, to
somebody
. Can you take me to an officer? Whose Company Front is this?"

"13
^th
Battalion Pennine Fusiliers. I can take you to C Company HQ. It's not far from here."

"It may be further than you think," Tulliver said cryptically. "Wait here." He slipped out of the door and peered outside. He held his revolver for appearance's sake. The nurses needn't know it was empty. He had some spare ammunition, but it was in the aeroplane.

"It's clear. Padre, you bring up the rear."

"Right you are."

They stepped over the rubble and out of the back of the ruined farmhouse facing the front line, to avoid the creature's corpse out the front. It took the women a moment or two to catch their breath at the sight of the lush green vista now surrounding them.

"Blimey!"

"Oh. My..."

"Hold fast, Abbott, Edith's going to faint again," said Sister Fenton. "Mr Tulliver, where exactly are we? These mountains weren't here yesterday. I should have been sure to spot them. How is this possible?"

"That," said Tulliver, "is the very question. Well, Padre, any answers?"

The Padre opened and closed his mouth several times before giving up and reluctantly shaking his head.

A strange cry startled them. Above, flocks of things that were not birds were beginning to swirl and wheel above the mud. Up ahead, they could hear the marshalling shouts and barks of NCOs giving orders.

"We'd best hurry. Watch your step, ladies," cautioned Tulliver as he led them across the mud and down into the nearest communication trench. He'd only ever once before had a trip up to the front lines, when visiting an artillery battery.

"That smell!" said Edith, faltering as she looked round for the source while Sister Fenton dragged her on like a tardy child.

"I know," said Tulliver, shaking his head. "Sweaty feet, unwashed men, cordite, army stew. If nothing else they should act as effective smelling salts, eh, Abbott?"

As they worked their way up the trench the party attracted cat calls and whistles from weary, mud-soaked and bewildered men. Tulliver turned back to check on his charges. Sister Fenton strode purposefully on, doing her best to ignore them, while Edith seemed to have recovered enough to smile coquettishly as she was pulled along in her wake. Abbott strode confidently behind. She looked longingly at a private drawing on a fag. "Aw, go on, duck, give us a Wood, I'm gasping!" she said as she passed.

The soldier leered at her. "Come 'ere, and I'll give you -" he began, before catching the eye of the Padre bringing up the rear. Flustered, he fished around in his tunic pocket producing two battered but serviceable Woodbines and offered them to her. "-- I'll give you a couple," he stuttered apologetically, smiling awkwardly as his mates jeered and jostled him.

Abbott took them from his hand. "Ta, ever so, ducks," she called gaily as the Padre impatiently herded her away.

One man flung himself desperately at the Chaplain.

"Padre? What's happened. Where are we? We thought we was in heaven, like, but them devil dogs attacked so it can't be, can it? Is God punishing us? Tell us Padre, tell us!"

"I - I don't know, my son" answered the Padre as he pulled away from the distraught soldier.

Further along, the revetments leaned drunkenly, their sandbags askew. In places they threatened to topple over completely. In others they had collapsed and they had to scramble over the mounds of spoil. When they reached C Company HQ they found a captain sat in the remains of the trench with his head in his hands. There was a bustle of activity around him as men worked stoically shifting sandbags and timbers, using shovels, picks and buckets to excavate the dirt where the C Company HQ sign lay half buried.

"Captain Grantham!" said Padre Rand, kneeling down by him. "What happened? Is the Major all right?"

Grantham lifted his head from his hands. His face was streaked with dirt and tears.

The Padre took him aside. "For God's sake, compose yourself, Captain. Not in front of the ranks. Remember you're an officer! Pull yourself together."

Grantham made an effort to regain his composure as he stood. He brushed the drying mud and soil from his tunic, cleared his throat and straightened his collar and tie.

"Can we help?" asked Sister Fenton, stepping forward.

"Eh?" The Captain looked at the women nonplussed.

"The nurses I reported on last night, Grantham," said the Padre.

"Ah. Right. Yes, well there's nothing they can do here," said Grantham waving away Sister Fenton's ministrations. "But I'm sure the MO can put them to work." He gestured to the pile. "The Major's dead, buried under that lot. I barely got out myself. There was a sudden jolt and the whole place just collapsed around us. There's the CSM, the orderlies and the signal chappie down there, too," he said earnestly. "And reports of other dugout collapses. I sent a runner to Battalion but he says it's gone. How can it not be there? And then there were those damn wolf things. I don't know what's happening."

"This man might be able to shed some light on it all," said the Padre, introducing the Flying Officer.

"Lieutenant Tulliver," said Tulliver, extending a hand.

Grantham took it. "Well I certainly hope you can. This is a right bloody shambles. The men are getting windy. It felt like a bloody earth tremor."

"A bit more than that."

"A mine explosion?"

"If it was it's blown us to God knows where," said Tulliver, looking up at the mountains on either side as he pulled his trench maps from inside his double-breasted tunic. He took a stub of pencil from his pocket and, after studying the map for a few moments, drew a rough circle on the paper around a section of trenches and No Man's Land. "As far as I can tell, sir, this area is all I could see from the air. It's as if someone had taken a giant pair of scissors, cut it out and dropped it down somewhere else entirely."

"Scissors? Talk sense man!" snapped Grantham.

"From what I could see from the air, sir," said Tulliver, "this circle of mud is all that is left of the Somme."

The tank rumbled and squealed its way implacably toward the trench and then stopped. Atkins could see where the beasts had clawed away at the trench paint - camouflage cover and the wire netting gable was torn and hanging off. By the time the engine had puttered and died Atkins and some of the others were out of the trenches and walking towards this new wonder machine. Its guns slowly lowered, as if bowing in obeisance or exhaustion. There were metallic clangs and bangs as a door, barely more than two feet tall, opened in the rear of the gun sponson and there clambered, from the pit of the armoured machine, one small man and then another. They were wearing oiled-stained khaki overalls covered with small burn holes and tight fitting leather helmets with leather masks across the upper halves of their faces, their eyeholes merely thin slits. From the bottom of the masks hung chain mail drapes that covered the rest of their face. They looked as if they'd stepped from the Devil's own chariot. Two more climbed out of a hatch on the top of the motorised mammoth and walked down the back of the now motionless track that encompassed the entire side of the tank.

"Bloody gas! Now I'm going to have to strip everything down and clean it to stop the damn corrosion."

"Jesus my head's banging!"

Atkins had never seen a more otherworldly group of men. They would have looked fierce and impressive, almost like some primitive tribal warriors, if two of them hadn't then fallen to their knees and started vomiting warm beige splatters into the mud, coughing and retching worse than a retired coal miner.

"Bloody hell!" said Porgy.

The little bantam bloke pulled off his helmet and mask to reveal a pale face covered with flaky, livid red patches. He took a swing with his foot, savagely kicking the body of a dead creature.

"That's for scratching
Ivanhoe
, you ugly mutt," he said, punctuating his invective with further kicks.

The lanky Tank Commander strode over and made a curt introduction. "Lieutenant Mathers. Who's in charge here?"

"That'll be Captain Grantham, sir," said Sergeant Hobson. "I'll get someone to take you to Company HQ."

Atkins turned his attention back to the others who were talking to the tank crew.

"Well if this ain't the Somme it's not my fault," the bantam tank driver was saying. "My map reading were bloody perfect!"