Trembling With Fear 11/04/2018

Zone Rouge

Father Paley trudged across the battlefield, the mud sucking at his boots, the blighted Earth trying to claim another soul. A pistol crack echoed across the desolate landscape and he paused to listen. Three hundred yards distant, spectral in the morning mist, he saw the dim shape of his Commanding Officer in similar hunched anticipation, but a moment passed with no further alarm raised and both men moved on in their solemn, silent sweep.

The day was cool but Paley sweated within his vulcanised rubber suit, condensation trickling down the inside of the pitted glass faceplate that further obscured his view. It was a blessing, in a way, the sight of so much death and destruction too great to bear unfiltered. Paley had been there in the early days, shortly after the Armistice, when the stench of decay had seemed to seep into everything, and facing what man had done to the Earth had weakened many of his colleagues to breaking point and beyond. Now, five years later, Paley was the only remaining member of the original regiment, and even he knew that it could not go on much longer.

He found the boy at the foot of a withered tree, half buried in a morass of mud and dark, gelatinous flesh that was studded with shell casings which glinted in the weak sun as the boy writhed in his shallow grave. Paley kept his distance for a moment, watching the boy and idly scratching at the back of his right hand, cursing the thick gloves that prevented him from finding any relief from his discomfort.

The boy wore a German uniform, but the sounds that issued from his straining mouth were no Earthly language. His neck twisted as he sought to face the cleric, but his eyes were gone, and his head swayed and bobbed blindly, until Paley crouched at the edge of the pit and made a soft, soothing call. The boy’s head whipped towards the sound, tendons tearing and reforming beneath the grey, beardless skin of his neck as he strained to turn towards him. His lower half, beneath the mud, quivered obscenely. Hungrily.

Paley rose, fumbled in his satchel and pulled out his service revolver. Throughout the war, stationed in nearby Ypres, he had never had cause to use it, had never even drawn it in combat; now he checked the cylinder and found that only one cartridge remained, the other five gone in service to his mission; It had been a long morning. He took another look across the field, watching for his C.O., but the boy was the only soul in sight. Satisfied, Paley pulled off first one glove, then the other, then reloaded the Webley and took a moment for a deep, satisfying scratch at his inflamed hand. It was an offence to remove any part of his suit in the Red Zone, but he was sure that he was unobserved and it was too late to worry about the other reason for keeping his gloves on.

The red welts on the back his hand seemed almost to throb in pleasure at that thought.

Paley pushed the idea away and pointed the revolver into the pit, murmuring the authorized, amended Viaticum, the Latin as alien and familiar to his ear now as the keening whine the boy gave out as he understood what was to come next and raised his arms to protect his sightless face.

Five years since the cessation of hostilities and the outbreak of peace, perhaps another three since this boy’s parents had received word of his supposed death, but still, here, in this forgotten, forbidden corner of the killing ground, he feared dying.

 

Yet in all his time in the Red Zone, day after endless day breathing the noxious, sulphurous air and trudging from one trench to the next as he tried to bring peace and surcease from suffering, Paley had never seen anything which suggested that higher thought remained. It seemed more than likely that in their transformation, under the effect of whatever hellish chemical concoction had permeated the land and warped their bodies, his charges had of necessity lost their minds, but whether it was human understanding and fear or simply the basic animal urge to exist, to continue to exist, the boy’s movements were the same. Paley saw the German pistol, the barrel protruding from a mass of congealed bone and sinew that could scarcely even be called a hand any longer. He finished the benediction, lowered his head, then fired into the boy’s sunken chest.

 

This was the closest he had yet come to battle, but it no longer scared him. What he did was an act of mercy, not war. The boy choked out a guttural bark of regret, then let his arms fall at his sides. A trickle of black, tarry blood trickled from the hole in the front of his tunic. His head lolled back and made Paley think of a frail, blind bird, struggling for each shallow breath. He holstered his Webley and carefully slid down into the pit beside the dying boy, taking the child’s misshapen hand in his own and whispering softly into his ear.

 

Across the field, listening intently, Paley’s C.O. waited for further alarm, then trudged on, satisfied.

 

A minute later, with the boy’s life over once more, Paley sighed heavily. He let the boy’s limp hand go and sat in the pit a little longer, using the barrel of his revolver to scratch at the angry red flesh on the back of his hand until the itch finally faded for a little while.

 

Then he reloaded the Webley, noted the time, date and location in his field journal and carefully eased his gloves back on, then stood carefully and climbed back up out of the pit.