They came hard and they came fast. I guess you could say I got sort of lucky again, because whatever had happened to them left them not giving a damn about their rifles.
The first one I shot went down hard, a spray of blood flying from the back of that misshapen head.
The rest of them came at me in a fury and dove into the snow, heading in my direction. The waist deep snow, where I couldn’t see them worth a damn.
The day was overcast, and that helped a little, but there was still a sun up there and the light from it made the snow glare up something fierce.
I could have tried hiding in the snow, but the way those things moved, I figured they were probably going by scent.
That meant I wasn’t going to be able to hide very well.
I saw something moving a goodly ways off, and I didn’t think, I just threw. The grenade landed on target, and a moment later I saw snow rising in an wave and at the center of that wave was blood and broken bone, and what looked like a German outfit.
I was still trying to figure out where the next one might be when it came out of the snow and hammered me to the ground. It let out a sound like a chimpanzee maybe, or one of those screaming monkeys. And while I was trying not to piss myself a second time those massive arms came down and smashed me flat.
I’d have lost that fight right away if not for the snow. The fool thing dropped me hard and fast and the snow was loose enough that I fell back and the snow collapsed on me.
No time for guns and too close for grenades. I pulled my bayonet knife. Those hands came for me again and grabbed my shoulders. The fingers were hot despite the cold, and the nails were thickened to the point where they cut my jacket sleeves.
My knife cut too. I thrust it straight in between those arms and was rewarded with a different kind of scream. The blade slipped into something solid and then skimmed along a hard surface and the thing jumped back, roaring, blood flowing freely from where I’d opened it’s face, peeling back half the flattened nose and slicing a gash from the lower lip all the way down to the collarbone.
God, how it screamed. Even as it came for me again. I had only one move, really. It never let go of my jacket even when it backed away. All it did was haul me forward and so I stabbed again and again, and I think I was doing a fair bit of screaming myself until I realized it was down and I was standing over it, my arm warm from the blood of the damned thing that was bleeding out in front of my eyes.
You ever try to pull up a rifle while you’re holding a knife? I don’t know how I managed it to this day. Somehow the knife went back into the sheath and the rifle was lifted on its sling and I fired into the snow wherever I saw movement.
I couldn’t give you details if I had to. I just know I burned through my remaining bullets, firing at anything that looked like it might consider moving in my direction. When I was done with that it was back to throwing grenades until I was out of them. I nailed that first tank another time and something inside it finally had the decency to explode in return. The shockwave knocked me on my ass again, but when I stood, there weren’t any things coming for me.
The German at my feet looked human again, just dead as could be. Whatever had changed it must have left the body when he died. He was a kid, same as me and I’d ruined his face with my blade. Enemy or no, his family never did a thing to me, and I’d taken him away and mutilated him besides.
Of course, when he came for me, he was something else. I focused on that part and moved on. Sometimes you have to do that, I guess. The details of your life can eat you alive if you let them. Best to temper them with a little logic now and then.
I turned toward the tanks. I had taken on a mission to help Jonathan Crowley fight the bastard that had sacrificed people in the middle of nowhere, France. I intended to see it through.
In the distance I could hear the rumble of the tank engines, gunshots, screams. I could just make out the tanks through the shroud of snow. Much closer, I saw the red figure I’d seen before.
It was a thin shape. I cannot say if it was male or female. Despite standing on two legs the shape was too far removed from anything I could easily recognize. A long ribcage, broad shoulders muscled with thin, sinewy strands. The face was something between a skull and a horse, and had a thick head of hair that was darker but no less red.
It looked at me for a moment and then it came for me, moving over the snow, barely touching the frozen surface. It hissed at me as it came, and it reached out with one long-fingered hand that seemed to have too many joints on each finger.
I didn’t try to escape. I was too busy being horrified.
Everything about the beast was red, from its long-toed feet to its eyes, to its straggly hair.
That had draped over its face as I started to pull back.
After that all I saw was red.
* * *
Jenny was next to me in the meadow.
It was that perfect type of summer day, when the wind blew softly and washed away the possibility of sweat. Before I left for the war she and I parked ourselves under a big old oak on the family property and we had a picnic. When it was done we talked about how we would be together when it was over, how it was necessary to fight against the kinds of savages that would attack our shores, how much we would miss each other. The list was endless.
While we talked we wound up laying together under that tree. She was nestled against me and resting her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t see her face, but I could smell her sweet scent and I could feel a few wisps of her hair tickling along my jaw line and nose. I knew then I’d marry her.
It was like that again, only sweeter this time. She was comfortable and so was I. I wanted it to last forever.
So of course, it only lasted a few seconds. But I remember it so clearly, so intensively, that even after all of these years it felt more real than all the time I spent in the war.
* * *
I was lying somewhere. Jenny was gone and so was the homestead. It was a forest, but it didn’t seem like the same one I’d been walking in and freezing my ass off in.
The trees around me were vast things, massive in a way I had never seen before. The ground beneath me was a soft, thick loam. Far above, almost lost in the thickness of the forest, I could see a blue slash of sky.
As I looked around I noticed two things at the same time. First, the red thing I’d seen before was there in front of me, perched on a fallen tree that had long since begun to rot away. Second, I was dressed in my birthday suit and nothing more.
I pushed myself backward across the ground, my bare feet digging deep and shoving my body away from the thing.
It was wet with red; it dropped the stuff from its eyes and even from the pores of its skin. The air around that beast fairly seethed with disease. Just looking at it made me feel like I was sucking in every kind of hellish infection that ever existed.
As I backpedalled, it jumped down from its perch and came for me, low to the ground, almost like a hunting dog, those red, wet eyes bleeding hatred.
“Why are you not mine?” I did not see that mouth move, I saw the heavy teeth, some fangs and some flat like a horse’s, but I saw no lips to move and still the words filled me.
“I-What?” The words made no sense.
“All that I touch is mine to shape as a sculptor shapes clay and yet you are not changed. You do not obey me. Why?”
“What the hell are you?”
It swatted away my question like a man dismisses a pesky fly.
“Answer me! Why are you not mine?”
I looked around as quickly as I could. It was a quandary: I really wanted my weapons and my clothes but I didn’t dare look away from the bleeding thing coming at me.
“I don’t know!”
In my searches I realized two things: I wore no bandages but I was not injured, and I felt no pain. Actually, I felt nothing. Not an ache from sore muscles, no hunger, no thirst, not even the mulch and leaves shoved up against me as I backed away from the thing. I might have bee
n a bit worried about that, but something with too many teeth was already coming at me and that sort of took all the worries away from the rest of my problems.
It didn’t touch me. Instead it moved closer and loomed over me. Andrew Cartwright used to loom over me when I was in third grade and he was in sixth. I was very adept at knowing what looming felt like. The menace was real, but it didn’t actually touch me.
Bits of rotted meat clung to those teeth. What I could only guess was dried blood mingled with the coarse hair falling from the thing’s head, and matted fur to the chest of the beast, but even from only a few feet away I smelled nothing.
“What did you do to me?” Anger surged inside of me, not quite burning away the cold fear, but definitely drawing my attention to the thing coming for me. How could I live a proper life if I couldn’t feel? Couldn’t taste?
The red thing moved closer, loomed over me and roared. I heard it. I felt it. Whatever it was doing, it had the upper hand.
“You are not here! You are still in the snow, freezing. You will die if you do not answer my questions! I will leave you there, to freeze!”
“I don’t know!” Fear aside, I was still angry and I roared my counterargument right back at him.
“What the hell are you? Why are you working with the Germans?”
The whole damned shape shuddered and jumped and shook with anger and it reached for me again, but this time it stopped maybe an inch from my face and I saw the claws of the thing scrape the air. I could see the way the pressure of contact with that air made the thick claws on those fingers bend instead of letting them touch me and I understood.
I don’t know how he did it. I didn’t begin to know why, but somewhere along the way Jonathan Crowley must have done something to me. I have always been a church-going man, but never been all that faithful and seeing what I had in the war already guaranteed I would never think much of God again. How could I? How could anyone be in a world where oceans were buried under the corpses of friends and enemies alike?
I didn’t think it was my faith that saved me. I thought then, and I know now that it was Crowley. He had managed somewhere along the way to stop the monster screaming at me from touching me.
And that knowledge made me smile as broadly as he did when he faced a new threat.
“You can’t touch me, can you?” I made myself stand and the thing glared at me and hissed.
I reached out to see if I could touch the beast and it stepped back, those red eyes rolling in the sunken sockets that surrounded them. There was no way I could read what that thing was thinking. It was too inhuman. But I could guess that it was furious.
“You can’t touch me. You can’t hurt me.” I stepped toward it again and I drove the flat of my hand into the beast’s torso and pushed with all my might.
I felt like I drove my hand into boiling oil, but the creature screamed as loudly as I did and then I fell back and landed in the bitter cold of the snowdrift.
I felt the cold. I felt the pain in my arm from where a bone shard had broken skin and where the wound was likely already starting to fester.
I nearly wept. Every pain, every discomfort, was a blessing after only a few moments of absolute numbness.
I was so happy I almost missed the thing coming for me.
I need to make this clear. I’m older now and I’ve lost a lot of my mass, but back then I was over six feet tall and I weighed in at a solid hundred and seventy pounds, if you added in all supplies I was carrying. That red nightmare was tall and skinny and if it weighed in at more than a hundred and twenty-five, then I will eat my hat.
It grabbed me by my arm. I felt the wound that Januski had patched up tear open under the pressure. I swear to you now, I felt the disease spill into that wound through my jacket, my shirt and my bandages.
And then it threw me. I said before that Crowley got thrown. I did too and I think I went further. I saw the tanks go by while I was tumbling through the air and screaming my fool head off.
I hit the snow hard and fast and sank into it. To this day I don’t know what I hit. I just know it broke my arm in three places.
I have to guess I screamed. I don’t clearly recall.
I got up. I don’t know how, except that maybe it was adrenaline. I looked toward the area I’d come from and had no idea how I could have gone that far and lived. I know I was in shock. I also know the pain that was howling through my arm and my body probably helped keep me going.
I looked for Crowley, and I found him.
I can’t say if the damage I saw was done by me or by something else, but the tanks were in horrible shape. The damage to a couple of them was definitely my doing. The other two? I don’t believe so. The very first tank, the lead vehicle, it was on its side and billowing black smoke from every conceivable opening. The treads were broken, the underbelly of the thing bled oil and fuel and even as I watched it caught ablaze. I expected an explosion, but instead it just burned and the people inside of it screamed.
They screamed and I shivered.
The tank that Crowley had started for in the first place was a different case. It was still intact, but the hatch at the top was open and while I could not see what was inside the vessel, I could see odd lights. The sort of lights I had never seen inside a tank before, flickering and offering colors from every possible part of the spectrum.
In front of that I saw Crowley arguing with a man in a black SS uniform. The man held an ancient knife. I have to guess that it was ancient, because the blade was made form some sort of black stone and the handle was covered in old, cracked leather and dangled several more stone trinkets under it.
Crowley stared at that blade like it was a cross and he was a vampire. He didn’t seem capable of looking at it for long without flinching. A man I had seen charge across a half a football field’s distance in a hail of bullets. A man I had seen take on a monster made of rotting bodies and headstones and worse things. He looked at that knife with genuine fear in his eyes. And he looked at the man holding the knife with hatred. I would not want to face Crowley under the best of circumstances, but the anger he aimed at the Nazi should have burned him to the ground.
The Nazi was a thin man, even more gaunt than Crowley. He was pale and his skin was sweating. It was snowing. The air that came from my mouth with every breath was a fog, but the man was sweating. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and I had to think he was sick, like pneumonia sick.
As if to make my point, he coughed and then doubled over in a coughing fit. The only part of him that didn’t move was the hand holding that knife out like it was a ward to fend off Crowley.
Crowley didn’t move on him.
I did. I’d like to say I ran across the field and tackled the sick bastard that had killed those poor souls back at the inn, but the truth was I started slogging his way and cursing the lack of any real weapons on my body.
Not that there were many I could have used. My arm throbbed with every heartbeat and I had to take in hard, deep breaths to keep moving.
The good news was that the man in black kept trying to cough out his lungs.
Crowley looked at the man and seemed intent on trying to reach him, but he never moved forward. He just glared.
No gun, no knife. Not even a rock. I only had one arm to use, so I just pushed through the snow until I finally flopped onto the road I did my best to catch myself with my one decent arm, but the other one, the useless one, flapped around a bit, and every movement made me want to vomit or pass out or both.
I couldn’t tell you how I managed to get to my feet. All I know is that I went for the SS officer and I slammed into him with all my mass. He was thin and feverish and coughing his fool head off until he was almost purple in the face and his eyes were bulging.
I wouldn’t say I hit him all that hard, but it was enough. Down he went into the snow near the last remaining tank and he let go of his knife to catch himself. He let out a scream and coughed again and I reached down with my one good hand and grabbed his little kn
ife and held it in my hand.
And while he was still coughing, I backed up.
And then Crowley smiled again.
By the time I’d made ten paces back, Crowley was on him. He hauled the coughing man off the ground by his jacket and screamed questions at him in German.
The man laughed and coughed at the same time, shaking his head. I don’t think he could respond in any other way. I thought then and I think now that he was already dying from whatever sickness he’d taken into his body.
Crowley might well have shaken the wreck to death, but then the red thing came back.
It looked the same. It was red and wet and furious. It didn’t even seem to notice me when it came charging through the snow, leaving red footprints as it moved.
Crowley stood his ground. He reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a handful of black powder. I don’t know what he said or what he did, but when he opened his hand the dust moved against the wind and swirled into a stream that slapped the red thing in the face like a swarm of bees. It fell back into the snow and screeched. My ears throbbed from the sound.
The skin on the red thing burned. It blackened and smoldered and I watched the black patch grow, moving over the body as it rolled and hissed and shrieked in agony. The eyes of the thing blackened and it fell onto all fours before grabbing at the snow and trying to wash away whatever Crowley had done.
And then it jumped for the tank.
Crowley had been grinning before that, but he changed his mind when it started moving into the tank itself.
It did not climb the side of the tank and move through the open hatch. It dove for the metal and flowed into it like a man diving into water. The steel sloshed and buckled around it before becoming what it had been before.
“Damn it, no!” Crowley ran for the tank.
The tank squealed as loudly as the demon had and started collapsing in on itself. The metal crunched and screamed and bent, and the thing that had moved into it took it over.
That’s the only way I can say it. The thing I’d seen earlier was pulled from the graveyard and it seemed like this was a similar notion. The Panzer didn’t quite melt. It didn’t grow hot or fall apart and rebuild itself into something else like the cars in that Transformer movie. It just sort of pulled itself together into a new shape.
SNAFU: Hunters Page 15
