Free [Dept. 19 Files 02] Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 by Will Hill Page A

even he could never have conceived of the slaughter that had taken place in the four long years of war that had just been concluded: the futile senselessness of the marches across no man’s land; legions of young men obliterated by the machine guns they had been ordered to walk towards; the devastating power of landmines that were tunnelled beneath enemy trenches and exploded with a noise so huge it seemed to tear the sky, leaving nothing behind except an agonising, high-pitched whine and a soft, warm rain of mud and flesh.
    As the armistices were signed, one after the other, the mood of the men that had survived their time in hell changed from fear and misery to elation and relief. Valeri, on the other hand, had felt a great sorrow; he knew that he had been witness to something unique in all of history, and its passing saddened him. Bored, he had sent to Romania for his wife, and the two of them had followed a troop train south into Italy where it was immediately obvious that the euphoria that followed the end of the war was not going to last. The flu virus that had begun to kill soldiers on the battlefields in August had accompanied the survivors home, and was hungry.
    No one knew exactly how many men and women had died in Rome. A bartender Valeri had spoken to the previous evening had heard rumours that the figure was already in excess of a million and climbing fast. This would have seemed ridiculous to Valeri had he not tasted the virus himself, felt it attack his biological system with such ferocity that even his supernatural physiology had needed the better part of a day to fight it off; what it must be doing to the bodies of normal humans, he could scarcely imagine.
     
    Valeri felt his wife’s arm tense and his mind swam back into the present. He had been lost in thought as they walked through the cold evening air of Rome, thick with the scents of rot and decay, and he had not noticed the woman approaching them on the other side of the street. Ana had, though; she had spotted her immediately, plucking her delicate scent from among the clusters of drunks and vendors that were ambling back and forth across Via Rasella, and had felt the familiar fluttering of desire in the depths of her stomach.
    The woman was tall, and possessed of the milky white skin and smooth lines of youth. Her black hair fell in a loose ponytail over her right shoulder and came to rest on the shelf of her breasts, where the application of a whalebone corset had engineered a startling cleavage. She walked quickly, her head lowered against the leering glances and whistles of the men she passed, her hands clasped together in front of her, the heels of her shoes clattering rapidly on the cobbled street.
    Valeri stopped in the middle of the road and looked at his wife. “Do you want her?” he asked.
    “I do,” replied Ana, her eyes full of lust. “I want her.”
    Valeri smiled. “Then you shall have her.”
     
    Thirty yards north on Via Rasella, Captain Quincey Harker swayed unsteadily on his feet. Beside him, Charles Ellis, the polite, bespectacled Private who had taught German in a northern grammar school until war broke out in 1914, looked on with mild disapproval as two huge men in British army uniforms held up a young man, his figure so slight it appeared as though a strong wind would blow him over, by the shoulders while he vomited enthusiastically into the gutter.
    John McDonald, the enormous Scottish highlander whose hair and beard flamed red in the flickering, amber glow of the gas lamps, was booming with laughter.
    “Get it out, son!” he bellowed. “Get it all out. You’ll feel better.”
    The Private holding the man’s other shoulder was almost as huge as McDonald. His name was Stuart Kavanagh, and he was the latest in a long line of vast Somerset farmers; his wide, open face bore a grin of tremendous amusement as he watched a bottle of reasonably decent red wine erupt from the stomach of Private Ben Potts and splash on to the