PROLOGUE

About me the chamber smoked and seethed, and against the ache of my chest I pushed away from the floor. As slowly the vapors cleared, I saw against the wallpaper Elizabeth in her sailor's dress as when we'd first met, hands before her, eyes vacant and looking down. "Bring us the girl…and wipe away the debt. She whispered. The words were hers, though it seemed as though she hadn't said them at all.

"Elizabeth?" I groaned, hearing now the sound of horses and automobiles through that solitary window…followed by sirens.

CHAPTER 1. THE GUNS OF AUGUST

"LEVIATHANS!"

The cry wafted from our southernmost flank, through the barbed wire out near Tommy's position, carrying over pulverized brick and earth and bone beneath a brilliant starlit sky. Though his squad was nearly 200 feet distant, Parsons' men were visible, situated upon a low ridgeline against the sky glow of the city beyond. The rain-filled crater that had once been a chalet, our home for the previous three hours, at once became utterly still, the scent of muck and death tanging the air. Faint but true, a dread clanking eked from the east…and ahead.

Lewis was still peering over the crater's lip…too far. By his jacket I pulled him back into the muddy water, spoiling his invitation for a bullet in the face. "Periscope." Perhaps he'd thought the cover of darkness enough, but against the Viks I knew better. After a chastened moment he went for his ruck, my Corporal extracting a rectangular wooden contraption following a concerted search. With a glance to him then it, I cautiously raised the device's telescoping head to "S" over the broken dirt rim of our redoubt. In the light of the waning moon I made out three of the beasts breaching the far wire of No Mans' Land, twenty feet high and a hundred feet long, each crawling relentlessly forward on articulated tracks at maybe three miles per hour…crushing the Red defenses, stumps of blasted trees and everything else in their paths. In their wake I could see dimly plumes of black soot…a literal smokescreen beneath which undulated dark, ant-like columns of infantry. To the north flashes that weren't lightning lit the clear night sky.

"What do you see, Sergeant DeWitt?

"Three of 'em for sure and a hornswoggle of shock troops…too dark to tell if there are any more, but I wouldn't put it beyond the bastards. At the rate they're handling their own works, ours won't slow 'em either." I strove to keep a level voice. "Best guess…ten minutes before they're on us." My platoon looked to me with wide eyes, and I felt myself swallow before noticing one of the new replacements, Johnson, suddenly fumbling with his Springfield at the back of the hole.

THUMP THUMP THUMP resounded from our rear…Bertha, Fred and Mathilda…heavy guns speaking the brutal language of war. Overhead their rounds coursed with crack and shudder. Instinctively we ducked, though my men's eyes quickly followed. After an instant they were all peering stupidly over the crater wall into No Man's Land. Instead of fire below, the sky lit up with three miniature suns spaced evenly up and down the lines by a mile. Floating down under parachute, the white and orange light brightened the broken stumps and dangling corpses in garish, shifting shadows. Back to the scope I dove, lining up the progress of the juggernauts against our pre-registered artillery points. They were closer than I'd thought…too close. And there were more. Like meerkats my men hovered looking in the blistering light, all targets.

"Get off the wall, you god damned idiots!" I shouted, yanking Kaplan back myself while urging with my eyes Lewis to do the same with the others. With Johnson still at my side, I turned and whispered over the growing approach of machination. "Probe at least, maybe an all-out assault…at least…twenty…engines trundling north and south of us. Get Lieutenant Thompson on the wire."

"Yes, Sergeant!" The blond kid chattered, splashing through the ankle-deep pool to rummage our stack of kit near the trench entrance that ran back toward our forward lines. Across the flare-illuminated murk he unreeled its cord, handing me the leather case after two spins of its handle.

"Third Platoon, Charlie Company, Lieutenant Thompson speaking." The handset answered in a scratchy voice.

"Sergeant DeWitt, Observation Post Baker. Sir, we have three Leviathans breaching No Man's Land in front of us, followed by columns of Vik regulars. More of the same your way and to the north. We need artillery on points OP Baker 3, 7 and 12, pronto!

"Baker 3, 7 and 12…got it, Sergeant! Keep your heads d…" Up Parsons way machine gun fire struck, the impact kicking dirt high into the sky. The handset went dead in my hands. For a moment I stood there looking at it dumb as fire commenced from the hillock. At my sides Johnson and Lewis looked to me.

I glanced to the fire engulfed hill then the blonde kid. "Your lucky day, kid. Baker 3, 7 and 12. You need to run that fire mission back to the Artillery boys fast as your legs can carry you! Give them my initials, B.D."

"Yes, Sergeant!" He said and was off, through the water and back through the zagging entrenchment to our rear.

Beside me Lewis nestled close, taking from my hands the box to peer at our upcoming breakfast guests. "My God…the soot those things are belching! Why can't we hear their damned engines?!"

"Beats the hell out of me." I answered, taking the viewer back. "Must be something new."

Lewis looked to me sidewise, crop of dark hair and eyes caught in the glint of the flares. "Brett's fast but not as quick as those monsters. By the time he reaches the guns, they'll surely be beyond our marks. Booker…we need to fall back!"

"Fall back to where, Henry? Paris? We're spread thin as paper out here, and if we don't hold they break through…hit our rear, burn our depots and roll up our whole front. The city would fall within a day…and everything to the Channel not long after."

"Then what do we do? Brett will never reach them in time!"

For a moment I hesitated, my hand being a loser. I had only a couple of decent cards. "Karlman, Haberny…bring up the torpedoes!" I turned back to Lewis, the Amherst native outwardly still calm but tense. "You're right…it's going to be too late for the artillery but if we hold them here, maybe our guns might have a chance at this position."

Behind Karlman turned to me, wide-eyed. "Call them in…here?" He said. Lewis looked on with similar horror.

"I don't intend to be here when the shells fall." My eyes found Mitchell. "Private, I need you to head back to the guns. If the machines haven't been stopped by Johnson's fire order, call in a strike in twenty minutes on this position. Do NOT come back…stay with Lieutenant Farris and First Platoon in the main line. Got it?"

The infantry man seemed to absorb my information. "Yes, Sergeant."

"Then skedaddle." After a hesitance, looking at his friends, he saluted and followed Johnson into the dark.

"Do…do you think Lieutenant Thompson bought it?" Lewis finally said, voice quiet against the growing din of battle…almost in confidence with me.

"I don't know." From my sheath I drew steel, seeing the growing realization in my Corporal's eyes that our Lieutenant's fate really didn't matter to us now. "SQUAD!" I ordered. "FIX…BAYONETS!"

#

The first machine crested our crater with a sudden roar, a lumbering behemoth cranking and grating, belching smoke, smashing dirt and wood to smithereens. Where there had been barely any noise at all before, the air was suddenly filled with it. Beside me Lewis and Tate shrunk from the sound and the thing's massive treads, our backs to the crater's rim, fearing as the hulking steel brick towered above that the soil might buckle and its hellish mass smash us all. Bangalore in hand, Haberny saw the moment and lunged, jamming the tube's beak beneath the breaker's hull in a thin spot, retreating hastily as superheated soot belched out the machine's top stacks. With my glance to Karlman, our demolitions man pushed the plunger.

Out the beast's topside fire exploded…engines suddenly screaming cries of snarling death alongside the shrieks of men inside. Upon its glacis hatches opened and flames licked, chasing burning, screeching figures skyward. Erratically a lone side turret began to jerk toward our position, and with widening eyes the seven of us clambered madly up the dirt.

Red goggled eyes of helmeted Bavarian regulars met us at the crest.

"OPEN FIRE!" I screeched, jamming my bayonet into the first soldier's gullet. Steel and blood erupted from his back as his weapon fell, fingerless gloved hands clutching the spike in his chest, red spherical eyes fixating upon me in death. Explosions flashed to their rear, illuminating the field as the first line of gray-coated Viks went down, our Repeaters aflame, scything the night troops from unexpected ambush like grass as they crested the crater's precipice. To our flanks more flowed, spilling over like a wave washing round a castle of sand, down into the crater and the water, groping for its rear. Before I could pull my spike from the man's belly that last turret on the Leviathan opened fire, tearing a cluster of their own soldiers to shreds. Against the spray of blood and water I raised my weapon to shield myself.

To my side Tate staggered, bone exposed, missing the rest of his arm below the elbow, followed by a singular scream from Karlman's direction. A dark shape loomed to my right…a gray-coated bruiser raising a bayoneted barrel to my head, those goggles glistening in the battle light, making him look like some kind of gargantuan moth. Beside me Lewis' Springfield cracked in fusillade, nearly taking my ear as round after round bludgeoned the giant in the face. Where he'd stood now came the shadows of a dozen more monsters, eyes glistening. I racked my weapon and unloaded. A hundred feet away the next trench breaker's machine guns barked and Iberson exploded in a cloud of pink vapor. Between the burning monster and the new one, we were hemmed in. About me I looked, knowing this to be the time for the guns…or was it already too late?

For going on two years now, it had been too late.

After losing her, loathing what Engels' men had forced me to do, I'd sworn never to unleash that power again…as if that had been the reason I'd lost her. Had it been God I'd thought would bring her back for affronting him no more? Or more generically Providence or Fate or whatever I'd encountered between the Lighthouses? With death upon us, I clenched my fist. Behind us the obstinate side-mounted 5-inch gun on the burning Leviathan erupted in a billow of flame, its gunner screeching as my fury consumed him in fire hot as the sun. Inside a shell went off, followed by another, sending chunks of steel flying and the approaching wave of Viks diving for cover. Before us the next breaker's machine's guns fired undaunted, pelting the ground ceaselessly and sending a spray of dirt and shrapnel into the smoke-filled, fire-lit sky.

I spun and vented all my rage on its impudent steel.

From inside the towering hulk seemed to burp, metallic indigestion followed by an eruption of flame. At my fury Lewis stood spellbound. I dropped my hand, grabbed him by the coat sleeve an took him to the ground. "Get down!"

The trench breaker's magazines detonated, blowing a furious swath of steel across our crater and shredding the subsequent row of encroaching Vik infantrymen. Amid their screams a charnel pyre rose high into the air, fuel and unspent rounds joining the fury in a massive eruption. resounded the crash of huge steel chunks about us, dirt flying. Not far away a turret tumbled to ground and cartwheeled, sending earth flying.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

Down in the ravine shells began to explode…tracking slowly in our direction. "ARTILLERY!" I howled. "All right, Henry, now you're right! Time to…" Looking downward, I found the man dead in my grasp, half of his face gone.

"Sergeant DeWitt!" I heard a voice cry as explosions drew nearer. "They're shelling the OPs!"

Eons passed before I felt my lips move, crouching there, the corpse of my dead friend in my arms. "Fall back…" I whispered, unable to remove my eyes. Another shell hit closer, jarring me from my stupor. Dead men lay all about me, and soon, mercifully, I knew I too would be too.

And then I realized that some of them were still moving…and screaming at me.

"Fall Back!" I shouted. "FALL BACK!"

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have consolidated the Prologue into THE GUNS OF AUGUST for better flow and chapter numbering consistency.