The Sharp End

The Sharp End - Part One

And what about those other rumors?

a voice asked from the depths of his mind. Do you believe those, too?

Burke wasn’t sure. He supposed that if he accepted the notion of corpse gas, then he could accept the idea that one bite from one of those shambling creatures was enough to turn a perfectly healthy man into one of them in a matter of moments. The image of a rotting corpse rising from the mud drifted through his mind and he quickly banished it with a shudder and a shake of his head.

He refocused on the plan.

“We head downhill to this copse of trees here,” he said, pointing to the small wooded area directly south of them, “and use that as a staging area to move on that machine gun crew that’s set up inside the farmhouse.”

“If they turn that gun on us, we’re dead,” Moore said. “Why don’t we bypass the farm altogether, head west, and follow the river back to our lines?”

Burke shook his head. “With all the rain the ground along the river has turned into a massive swamp. We’d be at the mercy of both the current and any German patrol that happened along. If we stick to ground we’re familiar with, we’ll have a better chance of avoiding unexpected obstacles.”

Moore agreed.

“Once we take the farmhouse, we should have a clear shot across no man’s land,” his finger traced a path in front of the farmhouse and across a wide swatch of empty ground that they’d traversed the day before during the initial push, then off the southern edge of the map in the direction the rest of the army had retreated a few hours before.

“Good enough for me,” the sergeant said and that sealed it.

By dark, Burke intended to have all of them safely behind Allied lines.

“Get me the pigeon, will ya?”

“Sir.”

Burke watched as the sergeant headed across the room to where he’d left his rucksack and dug through it for the wooden box containing the pigeon. When the other man returned, Burke took the box and together they moved over to the kitchen table.

Resting the box on the table top, Burke opened it and withdrew one of the little square pieces of paper from the stack inside. He pulled the stub of a pencil out of the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and then quickly wrote out a short message in that week’s code to let the Major know what he intended to do. The last thing any of his men needed was to get shot as they approached the line because the boys in the trenches weren’t expecting anyone except the enemy to approach from that direction. If the pigeon was brought down, hopefully the code would keep the message safe. If not…they’d deal with that if and when it happened. When he was finished he rolled the paper into a tight tube and handed it to Sergeant Moore to hold onto while he prepped the pigeon.

The automaton was fashioned of tin and, truth be told, didn’t look all that much like a pigeon. Maybe a little, Burkethought, if you squinted at it. It had an oval–shaped body about twice the size of his fist with a slender wing attached to either side, but that’s where the resemblance ended. When the clockwork mechanism inside was properly wound and activated, the wings unfurled and beat the air around them, creating a thrumming sound that reminded him of some giant insect far more than a bird. Still, the name had stuck, if only because the devices had begun to replace the live homing pigeons that had been used to relay messages between trenches since the start of the war. Years of warfare, including clouds of poison gas and relentless enemy gunfire had decimated the pigeon stocks until it was far more common to see one of the automatons than a live bird.