I froze. I freely admit that. I took one look at what was coming our way and all thoughts left my head. They shouldn’t have, but they did.
All I wanted to do was hide. In addition to the tanks themselves, there were soldiers. So many, it seemed, that counting them all would be impossible. It was the perception, you understand. There were seven of us, including Crowley. Next to the tanks the soldiers seemed tiny, but they were there and we were grossly outnumbered.
We should have never stayed on the road. Around the same time we heard them, we could see them. More importantly, they could see us.
They did not check our credentials. They did not ask us to surrender. The Germans opened fire and a stream of bullets hit Januski and blew him into shreds.
That was enough to get the rest of us scattering. The tanks were scary as hell, but they also couldn’t turn and run as fast as we could. The weapons on them could do a fair impersonation, however, and they vomited lead and flames at a terrifying rate.
The ground shook. From time to time it exploded. Dirt and fire were everywhere and I had the fortune to manage not getting hit by anything as I ran for all I was worth.
Nunnally was right beside me for part of the trip but he stopped after a hard fifteen yards and turned back to face the enemy. He was swinging his rifle around when they ended him. I saw him drop from the corner of my eye. I also saw his helmet move past me, bouncing and rolling, dented into a new shape and bloodied to boot.
I lived. For a while I thought I was the only one. I tried firing back, and I think I hit at least one of the krauts, but I’d be lying if I said I acted heroically. I ran, because against four tanks and what seemed like an ocean of soldiers, I could think of nothing else to do.
How far did I run? Far enough that my body shook with the exertion and my heart hammered madly against my ribs. Far enough that every breath in the cold, autumn air was a painful stitch in my side. Far enough that the Germans stopped chasing me.
I was huddled in the woods when I finally lost consciousness. I cried myself to sleep.
When the morning came around I was shivering violently in the cold.
I might have stayed in a deep sleep for a while but Crowley woke me with a boot to the side of my helmet. He didn’t kick me. He just gave me a nudge.
I almost screamed when I came to, but the look on his face stopped me.
We didn’t speak for a long time. Instead he simply handed me the dog tags from all of my squad and squatted nearby while I looked them over and considered the situation.
There were no more tears. I’d cried them all out.
“The last tank.” His words startled me. He’d been quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“What?” I looked at him and sighed. “What about it?”
“It had the same mark we found in the cemetery. That means I’m going after it.”
“There are too many people.” I shook my head. “Too many tanks. You’ll never live through it.”
Crowley sighed. “Rules and regulations. That’s what there are too many of. The rules say I have to be asked for help. I can defend myself, but that’s all. If you ask for my help, I can do more than you might believe.”
“You want me to ask you for help?” Remember how I thought I was done with tears? My eyes gave off that same damned sting again and I shook my head. “What am I supposed to do here? Ask you to kill yourself?”
“Just ask for help. That’s all.”
I looked away from him for a moment and considered his words, wondering what would happen if I did nothing at all.
“Help me find the things they summoned. Help me kill them.”
Crowley’s smile was bright and chilling.
“Let’s go hunting.”
From that moment on my life became a series of exhausting maneuvers. Wherever the ones responsible had gone, they surely traveled by vehicles. We were on foot. I carried what I could, mostly extra ammunition and a few c-rations. Crowley hardly seemed bothered by the weight of what he carried, but I felt like I was sinking in the muck after an afternoon of rain washed the countryside. It was cold and I was miserable and all that mattered to me was not losing sight of Crowley as he moved along, looking at the ground and tracking his enemies even when I saw no indication there were tracks to follow.
We might have talked more, but he was too busy jogging along the roads and occasionally moving through fields.
When we stopped at last to rest I fairly collapsed. I was winded, dehydrated and dizzy.
“Still feeling good about following me?” Crowley’s voice was surprisingly soft.
I shook my head. There were no words left in me right then.
“So, the thing you asked about. How these things can exist.” Crowley shrugged. “There are other worlds all around ours. Most of them don’t know we are there any more than we know they are, but there are exceptions. Think of it like radio waves if that helps. Everything out there moves in its own way, and you, me, everything around us, it all moves the same way. Something moving in a different frequency might see us. We might see it. Hearne the Hunter, and his pack, that is a case where now and again we see something. It bleeds over. Hearne likes to chase down disasters. What he gets out of it I don’t know, but that’s what he does. The thing is, we can only really see him when the disasters are big enough to make him come close. He’s not a cause. He’s a symptom.”
Crowley didn’t look at me while he talked. He opened a C-Ration, looked at the dubious contents and then started eating.
“Thing is, there are ways to make things from other places more in tune to our world. Call it sorcery, because that’s what it is. You call these things and whether or not they want to come, they do. Sometimes the rules are specific and call for a particular demon or monster. Other times they just summon whatever is closest.”
“Where do all these worlds come from?”
“Don’t interrupt. It’s rude.” Crowley looked my way for a moment as he admonished me, but there was no venom in his words. They were merely spoken. “The thing to remember, and I mean this, is that sooner or later somebody always thinks they can work out summoning something to their advantage. They can’t. What’s happening now, is someone on the Nazi Party thinks they can use whatever they’ve summoned. They might be able to for a while, but it won’t last.”
I thought long and hard about what he’d said. He wasn't talking down to me, exactly, but he was simplifying and I was all right with that. I had a lot on my mind and I really couldn’t devote as much to him as I should have.
“Want to say that in plain English?”
“Son, I don’t know how much plainer I can get.” He looked my way. “Okay. Someone’s trying to summon a demon from Hell. That’s a good analogy. And that someone wants to control the demon. It isn’t going to work. Near as I can tell, the demon already got away.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because if the demon was still under whoever’s command, the damned Germans wouldn’t be looking all over the countryside trying to find it.”
“But the markings on the tank…”
“The markings are supposed to offer protection. Whoever summed the demon wants to stay safe. That’s why I’m going after the tank.”
“You can’t take on four tanks by yourself.”
“You’ve been dumb enough to stay with me, so I’m not really by myself.” He actually managed to sound amused instead of insulted.
***
The morning brought snowfall.
It was a wet, hard snow and even the treads from the tanks were hidden away. Despite that Crowley seemed cheery enough.
“Why are you smiling? We lost their trail.”
“Because if we have to stop, so do they. The snow’s going to slow them down, and that means we can get closer.”
“It still doesn’t mean we can do much to them.”
Crowley shook his head. “You’re still thinking about fighting them as if we were ever planning to
go in with guns blazing. That’s not going to happen and it never was.”
“Well, I never said…” I let my voice fade off. He was right. That was exactly what I was thinking. It was what I was trained for.
“We’re dealing with necromancy and dark magic. That means there is no time to play fair.” Crowley looked at me for a long time, and I felt like he was sorting through whether or not to tell me things he had kept to himself. “You get to stay back here for now. I need to look over where the tanks should be and I need to decide how to handle them.”
I thought about arguing. In the end I just nodded instead.
Two minutes after he headed in the direction of the tanks – I was guessing about that, because I couldn’t have told you where they were on a bet – I followed him. I told myself I wasn't going to leave a man to fight on his own, but the truth was that he’d got my curiosity boiling and I wanted to know more than I already did about the things he was talking about.
* * *
The snow was hellish. I mean that. If I could have figured out which way was back I would have taken it. What had started as a heavy snow in the night became a full on blizzard. The sun was somewhere above me, but all I could see were thick, fat flakes of snow falling from the heavens. And trees. I normally found those before I ran into them.
The worst part, I think, was the way the snow danced. It was charming when I was at home and there was a heavy snow. But back then I knew where I was and I had the lights of the house and a hundred familiar landmarks. Here I was in the middle of the woods, possibly even a forest proper – and if you don’t know the difference, I pray you find out under better circumstances – and all I could see were the shapes the snow took on as it twisted and whirled in the currents of a wind I barely felt.
The silence was another thing. I heard no noises worth noting, save an occasional sigh of the wind.
From time to time I’d stop and try to listen for something more, but all I ever got was the low, whispered sigh and the shivers as the cold sank deeper into me.
That continued on through the day and well past the time the sun set. In the complete darkness I had no choice but to stop. I settled myself under a natural shelter, several branches that crossed over each other and left me an area of relative calm. The snow still fell and tipped and tapped the canopy above, but there was still no wind and the silence lulled me for a while.
I wrapped up as best I could and tried to think warm thoughts. I couldn’t make a decent fire, but I tried for a while before giving up.
Eventually, I slept.
When I came to I thought I’d been buried alive. I wasn't actually far off. The weight of the snow-covered branches above had crushed them lower to the ground, but as I grabbed at the first of them and rattled it back and forth a cascade of white plummeted down and the branches started to rise. Nature can provide sometimes. I’m lucky I wasn't buried under all of that snow forever. I’m lucky I didn’t freeze to death. Lucky, lucky man. Sometimes I forget how lucky I was to live through that. Not just the blizzard, though that was part of it. I mean the whole affair.
The silence was a living thing by the time I stood and shook myself off. The most impressive noises I heard were my own breaths and the sounds of snow falling in loose trickles from branches shaken by my passing.
It was World War Two in France and the Germans were everywhere. I should have known that would never last.
I had made only a quarter mile of travel at best; heading in what I believed was as a southerly direction. Crowley was, I was certain, either dead or gone. I was deep in the Nazi-ruled section of the country and I did not want to be. So I was headed south. I hoped. The problem was that the sun was hidden behind clouds too thick to let me even really guess the time of day, and after a few attempts my compass yielded nothing but a constant, slow spin of the needle, I gave up and moved on.
Have you ever walked through snow that was waist deep? I was half frozen and I was shivering but working up a hard sweat at the same time. It was all I could do and all I could think about.
Until the thunder came my way.
I knew it wasn’t real thunder, of course. It was the echoes of artillery fire blowing through the countryside and bouncing off the hills.
I stopped my forward motion and tried to decide where it was coming from. It didn’t take long. I was walking straight toward it. The ground beneath me shook and my boot soles vibrated right along with it.
The tanks were close. I couldn’t hope to know what had started them off. Maybe I was too cold to notice until they were close by. Maybe they had been stopped and had only just started moving again.
What I do know is that I heard Crowley’s voice amidst the chaos and was drawn to it. He was dangerous, I knew that, but he was familiar and I was desperate.
I can’t say I ran to his help. The snow was too deep. I did the best I could, pushing against a wall of cold and wet and trying simultaneously not to be spotted by my enemies.
The road came up abruptly. The tanks managed to force their way through or over the worst of the snow with little effort, and each tank following after made the path that much clearer.
I pushed myself until I reached the trench the tanks had cut in the snow and fell onto the road in exhaustion. My muscles shook and my breaths came hard and fast and left my sides feeling bruised.
When I got up, I looked at the path of destruction in my way and I followed it. Several of the Nazi soldiers were dead in that trail, broken and bloodied and lifeless.
Each corpse told a story that I could follow easily enough. They were behind the tanks, that much was obvious. The first few bodies I found had cut throats or broken necks. It wasn't hard for me to imagine Jonathan Crowley moving behind them in the snow and killing them one by one.
The snow still fell, you see. Despite a night of sleep and a half-day wasted in an effort to move south, the snow still fell from a dark, leaden sky and didn’t seem at all concerned with the deaths of a few Germans, but it made wonderful cover.
I counted ten bodies killed in quiet. I don’t know how many died before I found the trail. I wasn't about to go back and count. All I know is that ten men died before anyone sounded an alarm. It was easy to understand. The snow was too heavy for anyone to notice much of anything. These days, they have all sorts of ways to track people without seeing them, but in the Second World War, you mostly used your eyes. Bodies fell and it wasn't long before the snow tried to hide them. By the time I passed the seventh body I reckon the first was already out of sight.
The tanks were moving and they were noisy, but they were barely silhouettes. I finally managed to reach the one at the end of the trail and Crowley was there.
The man was walking just behind the tank, letting the snow hit the monstrous thing and take the brunt of the force. He saw me and nodded.
He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me, which was kind of a strange thing, as I hadn’t expected to be there.
We couldn’t risk being heard over the tanks. It wasn't likely, but sounds can carry in the damnedest ways. So we slowed a bit and walked on, following the thunder down the road.
“I was beginning to think you’d tried for the Allied side of France.” His face was deadpan, but his eyes looked at me hard and I felt a blush coming on as I looked down at my feet.
“I thought about it.”
“Get lost?”
“Something like that.”
“I tried asking a few of the krauts what they were doing. They didn’t know. The only one who has any idea is in the second tank. A captain named Rotenfeld. He’s the one that committed the sacrifices.”
I remembered the bodies. Every time I closed my eyes I remembered them. Rotenfeld had cost me a lot of sleep.
“What are we gonna do?”
“I have to get to that third tank in the line. It’s slow going.”
“So how can I help?”
Crowley smiled. “Make noise.”
He handed me a pouch that was deceptively he
avy. Inside it I found several grenades. They were German made.
The good news about grenades is they all work about the same way. It didn’t take long to figure it out.”
“Which tank?”
“Start with this one.’ He pointed to the one closest.
Here’s the thing, you put down a grenade, you need to run. They make a very big explosion for their size. I always kind of chuckled when I saw someone throw a grenade in a movie, because right up until the nineties or so, it seemed to me they didn’t really get it. A puff of smoke wasn't all that happened. A body didn’t flip through the air and land in one piece all that often and even if it did, it landed broken in the worst ways possible.
So I ran hard to place the grenade. I pulled the pin and tossed the damn thing in front of the tank, and then I rabbited back to the trail and dove for cover.
I got lucky on the first one. I blew the left tread off the damned thing. Tank with one tread is about as worthless a vehicle as you have ever seen.
Before they could even climb out the see what the damage was, I was throwing another grenade and thanking God Almighty for my pitching arm.
The second tank in line rocked back a bit when the grenade went off. It didn’t seem to do much permanent damage, but I can bet safely the ears of those inside were hurting them at the very least.
I threw a third grenade that did even more damage to the tank closest me. But after that I had to run again.
The German soldiers were coming back to the end of the caravan and they were in a killing mood.
Here’s the problem. The soldiers that came back my way weren’t human.
I don’t know just what they were, but they were covered in fur and half ran, half loped on all fours, and their uniforms were torn because they just plain couldn’t hold all of what those poor bastards had become. They snuffled and growled and kicked at the tank a bit, and then they came for me.
There was no sign of Crowley. I’d done what he wanted and he’d moved on, looking for his chance to break into the third tank.
That just left me, and the pack of nightmares heading my way.
SNAFU: Hunters Page 14
