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him to understand what it was that had his sergeant so spooked.
    Another wave of shamblers had crossed no-man’s-land and was a dozen feet or so from reaching the edge of the trench. Most of Burke’s men were engaged, fighting off the horde that had burst out of the digging machine, and this new wave of enemy shock troops would provide the reinforcements needed to finally overwhelm the defenses.
    Once they were eliminated, there was practically nothing standing between the enemy and the rest of the division camped out in the rear.
    It would be a complete slaughter.
    “Do it, Charlie! Do it!” Burke screamed.
    His sergeant didn’t need to be told twice. Burke watched Charlie turn the crank as quickly as he could. A high-pitched whining filled the air as the dynamo inside the gun rapidly spun up to full speed.
    Charlie’s fingers reached for the trigger.
    The glass ball atop the weapon filled with a harsh light, and then twisting, churning arms of bluish energy lashed out of the front of the barrel. One arced across the dozen or so feet that separated them to strike the shambler sitting astride Burke dead in the chest, while others snaked past them to strike those in the front of the onrushing horde.
    The scientist from Tesla’s staff who’d delivered the “suitcase” to Burke’s platoon had gone into a long-winded explanation about magnetic fields, opposing charges, and a bunch of other technical mumbo jumbo that hadn’t meant squat to him, nor to any of the men listening to the briefing. But the one thing Burke did understand was the fact that the discharge from the device was supposed to zero in only on nonliving tissue, protecting the troops that might accidentally be caught in the cross fire.
    Burke prayed they’d gotten it right.
    And, in those first few seconds, it looked like they had. A web of twisting electrical balefire spread across the shambler’s entire form, outlining him in a blue light that sparked and popped with a life of its own.
    A grin began to slide across Burke’s face as he watched the thing shake and twist under the power of the beam.
    The grin swiftly vanished when one of those twisting bands of energy jumped from the creature’s face to the arm that was still trapped inside its mouth.
    Burke’s metal arm.
    A bolt of power shot down the length of his prosthesis and exploded across the cluster of dead nerve endings in the stump of his elbow, making his arm twist and jerk from the pain.
    As they both danced to the energy coursing between them, Burke thought he saw a dead man’s smile on the shambler before he was shocked into unconsciousness.

Chapter Four
     
    JASTA 11
     
    W ith a plume of black smoke spilling from beneath his engine cowling and his left wing vibrating hard enough to beat the devil, Baron Manfred von Richthofen carefully nursed his dying Fokker D.VIII toward the airfield that was just coming into view in the distance.
    Failing at this point would be more a blow to his pride than anything else. He had little doubt that he’d live through a crash; after all, his altered form had allowed him to do so twice already and from heights far greater than this. But the thought of crashing within sight of his own airfield, and the resulting humiliation he would feel when facing the rest of the Jasta’s pilots later that evening, sent a red-hot fury burning through his veins.
    No one bested him in the air, especially not that ridiculous American playboy, Freeman!
    For months now the American and British press had been comparing the two fliers to each other, and Richthofen had grown tired of the nonsense. Not only was he an officer and a gentleman, but he was also a freiherr, a titled noble in the Prussian Empire! There really was no comparison. Freeman’s “daring exploits,” as the press liked to call them, were examples of poor planning and careless decision making in the Baron’s eyes. If the idiot paid more attention to what he was doing, perhaps he wouldn’t end up in