What Moves the Dead (24)

None of the other hares moved. They did not even flinch.

A wave of tinnitus struck in the wake of the gunshot, and as I waited for the ringing to subside, I realized that there could be even more hares behind me now and I would not hear them approaching.

Which meant nothing, I told myself. (I hate how the tinnitus seems to drown out my thoughts as well, so that I feel as if I’m shouting inside my own skull.) They were hares, not wolves. A hare might give you a nasty bite if you grabbed it, but it wasn’t going to go for your throat.

I knew all this, and yet every instinct I had began to scream that something was behind me. Something dangerous. Something that was not a hare.

I do not argue with my instincts. They kept me alive in the war. I spun around to find two more hares sitting at the edge of the copse, watching.

My hearing began to slowly return to normal, but the skin-crawling sensation that Something Else was there did not subside. I turned again, and the original three hares were now four, as if another had sprung up from the ground like a mushroom.

“Right,” I said. I stomped forward and snatched up the dead hare. “That’s tha—”

It moved in my hand.

I flung it violently away, even knowing that it was a convulsion, that many animals kick after being killed. I had shot it in the head, it could not possibly be alive. Muscles spasm, that’s all.

I was cursing myself for a fool when the dead hare began to crawl away.

It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others.

Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare.

My nerve broke and I ran.



* * *



Perhaps if I was less skeptical and more credulous, I might have fared better. At the time, all I could think was that I could not possibly have seen what I thought I saw. The dead did not get up and walk around.

Sometimes, however, the nearly dead do. I have seen men with terrible injuries run a hundred yards to fall upon the enemy. I have seen men with bullets lodged in their skulls continue to fight, sometimes for days. Hell, Partridge, who was under my command, thought ka was merely hit in the head until a doctor found the bullet hole almost a week later. Fortunately he had the good sense not to try to remove it. So far as I knew, Partridge was still alive, although ka complained that ever since the bullet, ka’d had no sense of taste.

It was possible that the hare had been like Partridge. Perhaps my shot hadn’t been true. Perhaps when I thought that it was missing part of its head, it was simply bloody fur falling down in a particularly grotesque formation. The hares were the same dull gray-brown as the sedges, were they not? My eyes might have been playing tricks on me. And Christ knew that I had been jumpy and my nerves had been playing up. No, I was not a reliable observer.

I recast it in my head, trying to make an amusingly self-deprecating tale of it, and eventually related it to Denton. “The damn things all stared at me and I had a fit of nerves and ran away from a pack of animals that wouldn’t come up to the top of my boots. Can you believe it? Chest full of medals for valor under fire, and I squawked like a chicken because I flubbed the shot and the damn thing kicked in my hand.” I forced a rueful grin. “Between that and the cow, I’m not showing up well in the gunnery department.”

Denton, despite my best attempts at a diverting tale, was not diverted. He draped his hands over his knees, a line forming between his thick eyebrows. “That is most unsettling.”

“For the pride of Gallacia, certainly.”

“Not that.” He frowned. “Roderick says that you are not particularly fanciful.”

“I like to think that, though you wouldn’t know it from this afternoon.” I shrugged. “Well, you know as well as I do. Sometimes the oddest things set off our nerves.”

“True enough,” Denton admitted. “Soldier’s heart, we called it after the war. I once had a bit of an episode because they had lined the street with flags, and the wind came up and they were all snapping … the sound wasn’t like cannon fire at all, but it still was, you know?”

I nodded. I did indeed know.

“Then one of the flags came loose and it blew toward me.” He snorted. “Found myself down a stairwell two streets over.” His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.

“There, you see?” I waved a hand airily. “Névrose de guerre, the French call it. Makes it sound like a bloody pastry. Though I do feel bad that I flubbed the shot. I should have stayed to finish it off. Hopefully a fox or a falcon or something will take it before too long.”

Denton’s humor faded. He took a large swallow of the drink beside him. “Perhaps you didn’t flub the shot,” he said, not looking at me.

“Of course I did. It got up and walked away.” I didn’t tell him about it sitting up and watching me. That went well beyond névrose de guerre.

He said nothing.