By the Blood of Heroes (2 page)

As Burke looked on, stunned into immobility by the machine’s sudden appearance, hatches clanked open along its length and a horde of shamblers spilled out of its dark interior, falling upon the men of 4th Platoon with a vengeance. In seconds it was every man for himself as hand-to-hand combat stretched from one end of the trench to the other.

Chapter Two

TOUL AERODOME

T
welve miles away from where Captain Burke was fighting against a horde of ravenous undead, Major Julius “Jack” Freeman stepped out of his tent into the brisk morning, pulling on his thin leather flying gloves as he went. The sun was just breaking through the cloud cover, its feeble light barely visible through the smoke and dust that seemed to be the only constants in this never-ending war.

Despite the early hour, the home of the 94th Aero Squadron was anything but quiet. The mechanics had taken the aircraft out of the hangars and had them facing forward down the airfield where they were being prepped for the dawn patrol. The enlisted men were already up, manning the machine-gun pits that were scattered throughout the airfield, ready to protect the Allied aircraft on the ground in case of a German attack. If the enlisted men were up, so too then were the men of the hospital company, ready to drag the wounded to the hospital tents and the dead to the fire pits. The din of men at work filled the air around Freeman.

He snorted at himself in disgust at his characterization of the enemy.
Germans? Could they even be called that anymore? Each new assault swelled the ranks of the undead, and they had long surpassed the number of living troops left under the German High Command. An army of the ravenous dead didn’t care about nationalism; all they wanted was their next meal.

Freeman had been involved in the war from the very beginning of America’s support, when the 94th had been activated at Villeneuve in March of 1918. It seemed like a long time ago now.

He jammed a cigarette into his mouth and then removed a battered silver lighter from his pocket. It’d been a present from Rickenbacker, back before the invention of the gas, when this war had only been a war and not a struggle for the survival of the human race. He turned the lighter over in his hands and held it up so that he could read the inscription in the thin morning light. “A Gentleman and a Flier” it read.

Instead of cheering him, the sight of it made the airman shake his head in near despair.
Rickenbacker was gone now and Marr with him. At least they had perished in fires on the ground instead of rising to fight against their own men like so many of the others. Facing off in the air against his longtime friend would have been unthinkable.

A glance at the weathometer on his wrist told him that it was just after seven, with the air pressure holding steady in the green zone. Another hour and the wind would disperse the clouds enough to fly. Then the real day’s work would begin.

Might as well use the time to get some breakfast,
he thought.

The mess hall was set up in the old farmhouse. His squadron mates—Samuels, James, and Walton—were already there, waiting for the day’s briefing.

Not that today’s mission would be any different from the hundreds of others they’d already flown.

The aerodrome at Toul was only twelve miles from the front. Nancy lay fifteen miles to the east, Lunéville ten miles beyond that. The highway from Toul to Nancy to Lunéville ran parallel to enemy lines and was within easy shelling distance of their guns, making it difficult for the Allies to move troops and supplies up to the front in support of the men holding the line there. The 94th’s job was to patrol that long stretch of highway and do what they could to keep it clear so that the infantry wouldn’t be cut off.

Freeman joined his men as they were sitting down to a breakfast of syntheggs and ham. They both tasted like paste, making it hard to tell them apart once they were in your mouth, but he was glad to have them; all the men were. Real food was growing scarcer than a pig in Berlin.

As happened most every morning, the men in the squadron were discussing the enemy, and the argument went round and round without really getting anywhere. There were far more questions than answers. Why did the shamblers crave human flesh? What caused their ravenous hunger? Why did a small percentage of the dead come back as revenants, their physical dexterity, their mental acuity, and perhaps even more important, their memories, all perfectly intact? Understanding the answers to these and other questions was an issue of the highest priority. Solving them could bring an end to the war, but there was no way this group of farm boys was going to manage that. Freeman kept quiet throughout the discourse, just nodding noncommittally over his coffee, for he had nothing new to share on the topic.

After breakfast, while the men were still enjoying their coffee, a runner arrived with news that a wireless call had just come in from Nancy. Several enemy aircraft had been spotted heading in the direction of the aerodrome.

“Time to earn our pay, boys,” Freeman said as he led the way out of the mess hall and to the field.

The entire squadron now flew Spad XIIIs, and while Freeman missed his old Nieuport 28, he had to admit that the Spad was a nice substitute. Introduced in the fall of 1917, it had a maximum range of two hours’ flying time and a ceiling of just under twenty-two thousand feet. Armed with two synchronized Vickers machine guns mounted in front of the pilot, it had quickly become a favorite among the fliers attached to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). Rickenbacker had flown one until his death, and Freeman had decided to switch to the Spad in tribute to his old friend.

Mitchell, Freeman’s mechanic, had the major’s bird in the lead position and wasted no time getting the propeller spinning when Freeman climbed aboard. Being the careful type, Freeman took a few extra moments to be certain everything was in proper condition.

He checked the tachometer first, watching it as he opened the throttle and then closed it back down again to an idle, making sure the engine was running normally. His gaze swept over the fuel pump and quantity gauges. Next he moved to the physical controls. Waggling the control column, he tested the aileron and elevator movements, taking them through their full range of movement. The rudder was a bit stiff, but he attributed that to the cold morning air and didn’t give it another thought. A quick tap of a finger on the altimeter, a brush of his hands over the petrol cocks and magneto switches, and he was ready to go.

Freeman lowered his goggles, made sure that the lenses were adjusted to the same polarization by nudging the selector on either side of the goggles with the tip of his finger, and then gave Mitchell the thumbs-up.

When the same signal was received from the rest of the pilots manning the aircraft strung out in a line behind Freeman, the mechanic turned to him and swept his arm forward in a wide arc.

Freeman advanced the throttle, watching as the propeller’s flickering dissolved into a darkened haze. The Spad came to life, awkward at first as it tentatively moved onto the grassy field. As the engine surged into a throaty roar the machine picked up speed and its forward motion smoothed out, though the creaking and groaning of the undercarriage didn’t cease until the Spad eased itself off the ground and into the chilly air above. Just a few short minutes later the entire flight of four aircraft was up and headed east, following the roadway.

Freeman flew low over the Allied lines, knowing the Jack of Spades painted across the underside of his wings would be visible from his current height to the men on the ground. As America’s top ace, he felt it was his duty to encourage the men every chance he could, and the sight of his distinctive plane was sure to give a lift to those in the trenches below. A dark cloud of smoke was already spiraling upward from an area a hundred yards behind the Allied positions, the stench of burning flesh wafting through the air along with it, and he steered slightly to the east to get away from the stink of the corpse fires.

He couldn’t imagine the horror this infantry had to face on a daily basis. How the Germans had gone so horribly wrong in creating that hideous gas was anyone’s guess. It was bad enough up in the air, fighting aircraft flown by pilots who were long dead. How much worse it must be to sit there, mere yards from the newly risen opposition forces, knowing that the other side saw you as nothing more than that evening’s meal. Once when he was laid up in the hospital at Reims, he listened to the survivors of the Battle of Soissons recount their experiences. The opposition made assault after assault, charging out of that venomous green gas and through no-man’s-land as fast as their rotting forms could carry them. The long miles of barbed wire became heavy with bodies and still they came, stepping over the still-moving carcasses of their comrades to rush the trenches, dragging off those Allied soldiers unlucky enough to be near the break in the lines. The Allied troops fell back to the secondary and then the tertiary trenches before the attack had been repelled.

While that was bad enough, the descriptions of the Allied dead waking up later the same night in the abandoned trenches and crawling under the wire to assault their former comrades was far worse. Freeman remembered vividly the look on one private’s face as he talked about the horror he felt bayoneting the man who he’d just spent the last forty-five days huddled with in a foxhole and of his shame at then having to burn the body in the bonfires to keep his friend from rising a second time.

Remembering it now made Freeman shudder in his seat.

Thank God the gas only worked on inert tissue.
If it had the same impact on the living as it had on the dead, this war would have been over years ago.

As they neared the outskirts of town, Freeman began to climb higher, the possibility of being jumped at so low an altitude by the opposition’s pilots outweighing his desire to boost the morale of the soldiers on the ground. The haze was thick, the cloud cover fairly low, and Freeman wanted some clear sky beneath their wings before they were forced to engage the enemy.

Fifteen minutes later they crossed into enemy territory and ended up getting lucky right away. The observation balloon first appeared as a small dark smudge against the blue-green earth below. Reaching up with one hand, Freeman pushed the magnification lenses into place over the left eye of his goggles and took a good, long look at the aircraft ahead of them.

The balloon was one of the Caquot styles, a long teardrop-shaped cylinder with three stabilizing fins. There was a symbol painted on the rear fin, but it was too far away to see clearly with the goggles’ current settings. Reaching up with his left hand, he flicked through the magnification selections until the black German cross painted on the dirigible’s rudder swam into view.

They had the enemy in sight; all they needed now was an attack plan.

Freeman had the flight in formation at six thousand feet with his plane in the lead, followed by Samuels and James flying parallel. Walton brought up the rear, forming an aerial diamond. He didn’t give the signal to attack, at least not yet.

Instead, he craned his head around from side to side, huddled against the rushing wind, searching the sky below for the fighter cover that he knew had to be present. The opposition never sent the balloons aloft without the fighters.

They had to be here.

And they were.

Both aircraft, Pfalz D.XIIs by the look of them, were approximately a few hundred feet below and to the south of the balloon, drifting lazily along as though they didn’t have a care in the world.

Freeman waggled his wings, getting the attention of his fellow pilots. He pointed downward at the balloon and then tapped the side of his head with two fingers. He then pointed at the escort aircraft circling below and then at his men.

They understood. It would be their job to take on the opposition’s aircraft while Freeman went after the balloon.

They all circled back around, staying in the cloud cover until they could bring their planes into position with the sun at their backs. Then as a group they fell into a rushing power-glide designed to bring them up on the enemy as swiftly as possible.

Freeman watched the balloon grow larger and larger in his field of vision, his comrades forgotten as he focused on his attack. He covered more than half the distance to the other craft before its crew noticed his presence. He could see them floating beneath the wide bulk of the balloon in their wicker basket, frantically calling the ground crew on the field phone. Those on the ground were equally desperate, rushing to the mechanical winch in the hopes of getting the balloon and its crew pulled out of the sky before Freeman could reach it.

With his Vickers guns thundering in his ears, Freeman closed in. Even in the weak sunlight he could see the incendiary tracers arcing away from his aircraft and slashing into the fabric of the balloon. Before he got too close he pushed hard on the stick and banked his Spad, sending it around the edge of the balloon just as a bright arc of color danced along its surface. Seconds later the sky around him was filled with the glare and heat of an explosion as the gas inside the balloon ignited.

He looked back to see the observers jump out of the now falling basket, taking their chances of surviving the fall rather than burning up with their craft. He roared in exultation as he watched the flaming balloon crash to the ground atop the moving forms of the ground crew, trapping them in the blaze.

That’s four more of the bastards that won’t rise again, by God!

For the first time since he began his dive, Freeman noted the whine and crack of the machine-gun bullets coming from the troops below. He pulled back on the stick, taking his Spad up and out of reach of the weapons that were trying to claim his body for their masters.