Crowley looked at me. “You think you should be coming with me instead of caring for your squad?”
“I think if you’re really doing something like taking care of whoever killed those folks, you might need back up.”
“I don’t.” He didn’t sound cocky when he said it.
“You’re getting it anyway.” In hindsight, that was maybe the dumbest thing I ever said.
Crowley stared at me for what seemed like a long time. Finally he nodded. He also smiled.
“Fine. Try to keep up.”
A moment later he was cutting back across the field he’d stormed to get to the Nazis in the first place. He didn’t quite run but it was close. I did my best to keep up.
We moved hard and fast and I managed to keep pace, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy. Truth of the matter is, I think Crowley actually slowed to let me keep up with him but I can’t prove that. It was just a feeling. I think that maybe he cold have run as fast as a Jeep moves if he wanted to.
That copse of trees was the first obstacle. I saw several dead German soldiers in that cluster of trees. Most of them had expressions or horror on their faces. All of them were broken in ways that made no sense to me. I don’t think I had but a few seconds to look at them as we were going past. I know Crowley never gave them a second glance. I also know that image of their bodies has haunted me for decades.
Past the trees were more fields, most of them burnt out and blown apart. Crowley moved through them at a trot and I had no choice but to follow.
We kept that pace until we ran into a small town that had been utterly destroyed by the war. I can’t say for sure who destroyed it, but I like to tell myself it was the Nazis and that we could never have done any such thing.
I said it was a small town, but I think that’s wrong. There were a lot of buildings, or rather there were remains from a lot of buildings. Mostly there were shattered pieces of walls and foundations and the burnt-out husks of what had likely been homes and churches and a few communal structures.
The only thing that had not been destroyed was a cemetery at the edge of what had been the town. Headstones rose from the ground, a crop of remembrance to those who had passed before.
When we got close, Crowley raised a hand and beckoned for me to slow, to approach with caution. Not a word was spoken then, but I listened anyway.
The ruined town had unsettled me. I had seen combat. But mostly we’d managed to avoid civilized spots and stayed to the countryside. It was safer, you see. The remains had jarred me. All I could think as I passed through them was that there had been people there once. There had been families and they’d had lives and lived them as best they could and now all of that was gone. Either they were dead or the Germans had taken them. I did not know which, but I suspected the former.
The cemetery was worse. There was a feeling of menace there. The fine hairs on my neck rose as we approached and my skin felt almost feverish. There was something here. Something bad.
I said the cemetery was untouched and that was a lie. When we got closer I saw the truth of the matter. Each headstone had been marked. It wasn't a big thing, but it was there. Someone had cut each marker with a rune. Crowley stopped and studied the first one and then moved on. The same mark on each piece, two jagged s marks, like stylized lightning. I remembered that symbol on the lapels of the of the black-garbed Germans – the symbol of the SS. But a stroke mark cut through each of those symbols.
“What do they mean?” I asked Crowley, fully expecting no answer.
“Either it’s a sign that someone doesn’t like the Nazis or it’s a name. Hard to say.”
“A name?”
He sighed. “A name. A sigil representing that name. Or, someone doesn’t like the Nazis.”
“What kind of name?”
“If I knew that, sweet pea, I’d have told you.” I contemplated the fact that he’d just called me ‘sweet pea’ but decided to let it go. Crowley scared the hell out of me.
Maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t distracted him, Crowley would have noticed the one mark that was different. It was almost the same but three small dots had been added into the broken SS symbol and Crowley had been looking at me as he passed it.
As soon as he moved past, the symbol glowed, and the air thrummed; a single low note vibrated across the whole cemetery and Crowley looked around, frowning.
My sense of unease increased and my stomach turned and lurched. My mouth watered and I thought for certain I would vomit all over my shoes.
I never got the chance. Instead the ground quaked under me and I fell on my ass in the dirt as the headstones bucked and threw themselves to the sides. Something was moving under the ground and it pushed everything above it around with ease.
The earth shrugged and then let out a moan of pain. I was there when my daughters were born, and when my son struggled before dying in the process of being born. I heard the sounds my wife made. They weren't all that dissimilar to the sounds the ground offered up as it split and gave birth to a hellish thing.
I do not know about life after death. I'd certainly thought about it before. When you are swimming in bloodied waters and bullets are hammering the people around you and slashing the waves, the afterlife kind of becomes a thing you consider about as often as you blink.
None of my thoughts on the subject ever came close to what ripped itself from the cemetery. It knitted itself from the remains of the dead, clothed itself in the mud and the roots and the insects that feasted on the lifeless remains of a whole village.
There was a system to it. I remember thinking that even as I watched the demon heave itself from the groaning, whimpering ground. The bones and flesh of the dead tried to make themselves fit into a pattern that made sense, I suppose. The bodies tore themselves apart even as they ripped from the ground. From the smallest toe bone to the femurs, those bones collected in twin columns, rose from the ground like weeds stacking themselves into a misshapen mockery of legs. Mud and roots and blades of torn grass formed the muscles over a structure of bone, leaving much of the collected pillars of muck-crusted remains exposed.
Above that more skeletal remains crowded themselves together and pushed into a colossal form. It was not human, but it aped that form. A golem crafted from bone and filth, a giant with a head built from a cluster of skulls mashed together like grapes crushed in an angry hand.
It did not stand still as it was born. Like a living thing it writhed and squirmed. Like a monstrous, bloated deformed toddler, it staggered on clumsy legs and screamed its outrage to the world.
I screamed, too. Nothing in my life, not the war, not even the spectral forms of the Wild Hunt had ever prepared me for watching that abomination tear itself from the funereal womb.
That lump of a head was not a proper shape, but it hinted at what should have been. The deep cuts and broken earth formed a rudimentary face, hollows where eyes should have been, a bulge in the general shape that mimicked eyebrows. A gash for a mouth. That head turned and looked, the whole of the shape seeming to look toward me and then toward Crowley.
The thick, brutish appendage that closely mimicked an arm and a hand, swept up from the thing's side and crashed into Crowley, swatting him as easily as a grown man might slap aside an infant.
Crowley grunted and rolled through the air, his face battered into a new form, his body very obviously broken.
I did the only thing I could in that situation. I raised my rifle, took aim, and fired at the thing. My aim was good. Bone and muck snapped away from the shape in a small fountain, for all the good it did. I may as well have stabbed at a rock. One leg rose, ripping free from the earth in a cascade of severed plants and crushed headstone.
The shape came at me and opened its mouth; a low noise pumped from that opening, a wet sound that made me remember the bodies that never reached the shore at Normandy Beach.
I fired again with no noticeable effect, but to buy me time to stand. I stepped back, looking around for any possible we
apons that might be more useful, when Crowley came at the bone heap.
Crowley's face was bloodied. His clothes and his flesh covered in smears of mud. He should have been dead. I'd seen him hit by the thing and knocked aside as easily as a man struck by a runaway car. I’d seen his leg bent at an impossible angle, flopping as he rose higher into the air and then struck the ground.
There was blood on his face, but there were no wounds. There were shreds ripped from his uniform, likely spots where the bony ridges of a hundred jutting fingers had scraped cloth and then flesh away from the meat underneath. But there were no wounds.
Crowley was intact as he moved between me and the grave thing. Alive and smiling. He was enjoying himself. Madness!
The bone thing moved forward raising both malformed arms over its misshapen head.
“You should run! Now!” I knew Crowley wasn't talking to the beast.
Instead of listening I fired three more rounds into the thing. Bone exploded. Mud blossomed away. If there was pain, if there was injury worth noticing, it gave no sign.
Crowley turned toward me, an angered expression on his face. I could see the anger in his expression. I could tell the anger was because he was worried about whether or not I would live through the fight.
The anger faded and his eyes flew wide.
“Drop!” I didn't question him. I simply listened and flopped to the ground like a sack of rocks.
Just in time to watch the dead thing explode. I saw the streak of smoke. I saw the whole shape stagger a step to the left as something slammed into it. I watched the left side of the body bulge. Expanding outward in a sudden flare of fire.
That almost face took on a shocked look as the center of the beast exploded. Had it been alive the creature would surely have died. Instead it fell forward and caught itself on arms built from a hundred corpses as it bled mud and decay.
The world was still there, but my ears rang with a painful note. Debris covered me and my left arm was screaming at me, burning just below the elbow where the meat of my forearm was thickest. Blue afterimages eclipsed my vision, but I could see well enough to make out the shapes of soldiers coming at me from behind the veil of ghost shadows.
I checked my arm; a fragment of bone cut into the muscle. It was old, weathered and dirty, a part of the beast.
The bone golem tried to rise and Crowley stepped back and hurled a lump in its direction. Grenade. There was no doubt in my mind.
I dropped again as the creature exploded into several thick lumps.
Detritus flew everywhere. Muck and burnt, shattered bones, rocks, roots and squirming insects both intact and torn apart, arced away from the monstrous remains and scattered across the ground and both of us.
I have heard it said that in moments of stress the world slows down and I don’t think that’s really true, at least not for me. I think we simply take in so many details that in order to understand them we must focus on them so harshly that the world seems like it’s slowing. All I can say with any certainly is that the events did not seem slow to me. They were overwhelmingly fast. Only in hindsight could I clearly see what happened.
As the thing convulsed and exploded I saw something in the distance, a red shape. I did not see it clearly, and I did not see it well, but I remain convinced that I saw it, and that what I witnessed was not added later by my imagination. I saw it even as I was raising my arm to cover my face and protect my eyes.
I stared at the ruined thing and breathed hard. I wanted to look away but it was damned difficult. Crowley did not have that problem. He was looking back the way we’d come and he was scowling.
I finally looked that way as the rest of my squad came toward us. They were the reason we were alive. Crowley couldn’t have defended us at that time, I think. I know that I was getting nowhere.
Miller looked at me and shrugged. “Radio’s fried and Sarge is dead. We followed you.”
All I could do was nod. While that was going on Januski looked at the bleeding wound in my arm and pulled out what was left of his medic bag. I don’t imagine there was much after all he’d used on the sergeant, but he managed to find some gauze and a white powder that burned like hell while it allegedly disinfected my wound.
Crowley scowled as he looked around, trying to find out where to go next, I guess. He didn’t just look. He sniffed the air, examined the ground tasted the soil and finally nodded to himself.
“Good luck fellas.” He started gathering his things.
While he did that Nunnally let out a few choice words and backed away from the remains of the cemetery thing.
The dregs were moving, slowly sliding toward each other, bugs and bones and everything else. Nunnally bumped into Crowley as he was backing away and Crowley sneered at the remains.
I don’t know what he said. I don’t want to know. The words made me feel feverish and I could sense the power that came from them. All I know is that the effects were immediate. The bones in those moldering heaps caught fire. Some of them popped like firecrackers and others blazed hot and then hotter still until the light from them was nearly blinding; like flash paper thrown by a stage magician. And then they were gone, burned away into nothing more than fine ash that drifted up into the air and scattered with the wind.
Without another word Crowley started walking.
I followed him and my squad followed me.
Of all the things that went wrong in that war, that was the worst. My squad followed me. I thought I was doing the right thing following Crowley. I was so very wrong.
* * *
I’ll say this for him. Crowley did his best to discourage us without ever saying a word. He had a talent for scowling, tsking, sneering and generally being unhappy with being followed.
I was not to be discouraged. We had no radio. We had no commanders other than me. Frankly, I was looking toward Crowley to get us out of the insanity in one piece. As plans go it wasn’t much but it was all I had and I wanted nothing to do with being in charge.
So, yes, it falls on me.
We walked for two days without much of anything unusual aside from Crowley himself, who continued to hunt and stalk whatever it was he was searching for. He did not volunteer information.
Several times he left us behind, but I was good enough at tracking that I found him again, much to his disgust.
On the third day, as he was crouching low to the ground and staring at the way the dirt settled along the side of a narrow road, I asked him, “What are you hunting, Crowley?”
The sun was up, almost directly over our heads, and I remember him looking at me and shielding his eyes from the glare.
“Something made that thing we fought. The Nazis raised something with their sacrifices. I don’t know what. I have suspicions, but whatever the hell it is, it does not belong in this world and I aim to remove it before it can do any more harm.”
“How?”
“Same way it was brought here, I suppose. I’ll find out what it is and then I’ll get rid of it.” I could have been asking a stranger about the time of day. The only difference was that I’d have been asking a stranger in a bad mood. I don’t recall Crowley ever being in a good mood, really, except when he was fighting something. That was the only time he seemed genuinely pleased with his world.
I blinked back the wetness that stung at my eyes, hating what I thought of as weakness. Tears were for kids and for girls as far as I’d been told. I was nineteen and not wise enough to know any better. “How do those things exist?”
“You mean the monsters or the Nazis?”
“The thing that came from the ground. The red shape I saw. The people all cut up.”
“What red shape?” Crowley’s eyes instantly narrowed and his lips twitched.
I hadn’t thought much of the form in the distance. It was there, but like the monster made from the ones of the dead I was doing my best not to think about it. There wasn’t much to say, but I told Crowley just the same.
He nodded his head and then rolled
his shoulders. “Well, that might make this a bit easier.” The look he shot me said otherwise and I felt a flash of shame because I had not told him about what I had seen earlier. There should have been no reason for my worries, but there was a pervasive sense that I had let the man down, as if I had been asked by my teacher to go to the chalkboard and then completely botched a simple question. Crowley was like that.
When I was done with my brief description he stood and very slowly, carefully, scanned the area around us. He took his time and his eyes got a far off look.
As he looked, Crowley spoke to me. He said, “The world is full of things you don’t want to know about and even more that you never want to see. It always has been and likely always will be.”
“So monsters are real?”
His smile was not a pleasant thing. “Oh, yes, and some of them are even of the inhuman variety.”
I was puzzling that out when the first sounds came to us. They were distant, but not as far away as I would have hoped. Deep, throaty, rumblings came to us. Crowley frowned and I joined him. There are certain noises that stay with you forever, I think. Some of them are natural and some are not. This was a sound that lived in my nightmares for years, decades after the fact. This was the sound of a manmade monster.
There are folks I know who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every possible type of armament. There are kids in my neighborhood who, even today, can give you exhaustive details about the sort of fuel used, the number of rounds per second fired, et cetera. Here’s what I can tell you: the Panzer IV tank was a terror to behold.
I can’t quote the dimensions of the great, thundering thing that came at us from down the road. All I can say is that it was larger than life and I wet myself when I saw it. One thing to see a tank go by in the distance, or to stand by one of the vehicles that is on your side in a war. Quite another to have a vehicle like that aiming for you.
There were four of them on the road, dwarfing the road, tearing the shit out of the sides of the road with their vast treads. The ground shook. The air shook. Our bodies shook as the damned things came our way.
SNAFU: Hunters Page 13
