SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

by Jonathan Maberry

  And why ask Hereford to play the enemy anyway? Bit of a sledgehammer/nut scenario, really. For all the good it would do, you might as well get the bloody Catering Corps to play the bad guys and come at them with spatulas, egg whisks and their notoriously liberal attitude to ‘Best Before’ dates.

  Mick scanned the horizon, then cursed himself for being such a FNG. The 22nd wouldn’t stand on the skyline like extras from a dodgy cowboy film. They’d stay low. Hidden. Unlike Bravo Unit, they wouldn’t be wearing MTP cammo. They’d be in their usual ninja black.

  “Boo!”

  Mick spun around, swinging the SA80 up – and straight into the line of fire of a C8. His gaze travelled away from that snuffling snout, up the barrel and towards a pair of steel-hard eyes peering from behind the slot in a black balaclava. “Oh, bollocks! C’mon!.”

  “Bang, bang. You’re dead, fella. Shit, that was too fucking easy.” The owner of the eyes gave a little chuckle, and lowered his gun. “Seriously. We’re what, two hours in? Did you stop off for a Maccy D’s or summat? They did tell you we were coming for ya, right?” The eyes squinted in a frown. “Jesus, fella, you look like absolute hell. You need a medic?”

  “Perhaps you literally frightened the crap out of the little gobshite.” A harsh Scottish accent came out of the dark, presumably from one of the other 22nd members.

  He looked around to see each member of his Unit in exactly the same position as him, and to a man they were all staring at the business end of a bunch of C8s. When you were playing with these guys, you really, really hoped they’d remembered to put blanks in. The 22nd had done it again. He looked back to his captor, anger boiling up once again – that insatiable, unstoppable anger. He could feel his cheeks burning like someone had chucked napalm in his face. “You were supposed to give us a two hour head start!”

  “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, Shirley Temple! You think the enemy’ll go ‘One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred! Coming! Ready or not!’, do you? What are you, five?” The black-clad soldier grabbed Mick by the neck and hauled him to his feet. “Tell you what, princess. Lucky for you, I got sucked off last night by a blonde with the biggest tits you’ve ever seen in your life, so I’m in a relatively jovial mood. Know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna cut you some slack, fella. But so help me God, you tell anyone and I’ll personally bend you over the heel stone in yonder monument and buttfuck you ‘til you scream, got it? You have exactly five minutes to bugger off.” He looked at Mick and leaned in. “Are… you… still fucking here?”

  “Move out!” Mick didn’t need telling twice; nor did the other lads in Bravo Unit. They grabbed their kit and yomped out of there like the devil himself was after them. They needed cover, and they needed to be as far away from the mocking laughter of the 22nd as they could.

  “Oh, and watch out for the grunt crushers! They’re trundling around due north of here! You can’t miss ‘em, mate, they’re those fuck-off great green things with tracks and a bloody great gun sticking out the front!”

  The words and the laugher were finally lost on the wind. Now all Jones could hear was the sound of his team’s ragged breathing as they stumbled over the uneven ground, eyes forward, trying to avoid the plough ruts that would snap a misplaced ankle like a twig. “Keep to the left of the Stones! And stay tight!” He threw the words back over his shoulder, not knowing or even caring if his Unit heard him. He kept running, trying to put as much distance between him and those Hereford nutters as he could. He knew this unexpected second chance would be their only one. After this, there would be no quarter given. But Bravo Unit were Parachute Regiment Pathfinders. It was their job to work as scout units, evade enemy patrols, get as far behind enemy lines as they could, recon, and then – and this was the tough bit – get back again with intel and a way in. Satellite imagery might have made some of their job redundant, but there was nothing that could compare to ‘eyes on the ground’, gut instinct, and an up close and personal approach.

  What Jones and the rest of his unit didn’t want right now was another up close and personal interaction with the black-clothed bastards behind them. They didn’t have five minutes. He knew the 22nd would be on their heels within seconds.

  The sound of laboured breathing made him glance sideways. Keeping pace but struggling under the weight of a 30lb kit bag and an extra few kilos of SA80 was Cox. The newbie glanced back, meeting Jones’ eyes. The cocky, self-assured personality of before had evaporated. Yeah. Staring down the barrel of a C8 will do that to a man.

  The two men stumbled forward over the uneven ground, making painfully slow progress towards the Stones. It felt like running through treacle. Jones suddenly wished that some of his civilian mates could do this. Try running over a ploughed, muddy field carrying a shit-load of kit in the pitch black with a bunch of insane SF bastards baying for your blood sometime, and then fucking tell me that life in the modern army is piss easy, he thought viciously to himself.

  “Sarge, where’re we headed?” Cox’s words came in between gasps. The going was, in horseracing terms, soft to shitty.

  “There’re some old bunkers close to the Stones. We can hold a position there.

  “You serious? There’s only one way in! We’d be cornered!

  “We’d have a defensive position, you prick! And they’d be walking straight into a shitstorm of our making for a change! Now pick up the fucking pace!” Jones shoved Cox in the small of the back, sending him stumbling forward.

  “I’m just sayin’…”

  “Fuck me, are you seriously questioning my order when we’ve got the 22nd climbing up our arses? Move!” The shove this time was a damn sight harder and Cox measured his length into what looked like a soft pile of mud, but had a distinctively musky odour that suggested to Jones that it wasn’t.

  “Cunt!”

  “On your feet, soldier!” Jones ignored the insubordination, grabbed the webbing strap on Cox’s backpack and hauled him to his feet again. “Run!” Another shove and Cox jogged forward, muttering darkly and spitting out globules of ‘mud’.

  Jones stumbled forward another dozen steps. It was rough going that sucked the energy out of your legs in seconds, making them feel like they were turning into lead. Every step became harder. Jesus, I’m getting too old for this shit! Without warning the ground gave way beneath his feet. He tumbled head-first into a void, closely followed by the yodelling Cox. ”Bollocks!”

  He tumbled and spun, crashing painfully into unyielding walls and finally landing in a grunting heap on a hard, uneven and slimy floor. For a few seconds he lay motionless, trying to get his bearings and to quell the sense of panic that falling any great height without a packet of silk and a ripcord attached to your back generates in a member of Airborne.

  Finally, Cox let out a string of expletives. “What the actual fuck…”

  “Bunker, Cox. We’ve dropped into a bunker, that’s all. Stay calm.” Jones shoved the prone newbie off him and stood, switching his head-torch on.

  The two men looked around the chamber. “Bunker, huh? So they used stone slabs to line their bunkers during the Cold War then, did they?” Cox pressed a hand into the small of his back and arched his body. “Shit, Sarge. I thought dropping on you I’d have a bit of a cushion. But you’re knobblier than a sackful of rocks!” He flexed again. “I think I’ve cracked a rib!”

  “Jesus H Christ, will you please give your damn mouth a rest for two seconds!” Jones stared at the walls, puzzled. This was no Cold War concrete bunker. For starters, it was circular. And huge. And as Cox had so ably pointed out, it was also lined with stone.

  Jones stood and dusted himself off. As his eyes adjusted to a different kind of darkness, he could see that the chamber they had so unceremoniously landed in was huge. And it stank. Dear God, it stank! A vile odour you could practically chew. It made the air feel thick and suffocating, like being smothered by a rancid blanket. The curved ceiling of the chamber was lost in an ocean of thick, black shadows that made it feel oppressive and much lower tha
n it actually was. In the middle of the inky blackness was a slightly lighter patch – the break in the ground they’d tumbled through. The gap was framed by whiskers of silhouetted grass stems, and Jones could make out a few distant stars twinkling above. Gronking to itself, a raven flapped lazily across the night sky, its guttural calls echoing around the landscape.

  Not a bunker, then. Something older. A tomb, perhaps? One of the barrows that littered the landscape? There were plenty of them, most of which had been excavated by archaeologists over the years. Was this one of the hundreds that had already been documented across the south of England, dating back to a darker, more savage and bloody era? Or was it a previously undiscovered one, secreted away for thousands of years?

  Jones sniffed, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The smell in here was truly god-awful, like someone had left a whole box full of dead rats out in the sun. “Right then. We’re stuck in a shitty old tomb that smells worse than your mother’s fanny. If we were archaeologists, I guess we’d just about be pissing our pants with excitement right about now. But seeing as we’re serving soldiers in Her Mage’s army, it’s now our duty to get out of here in one piece and report this as a hazard. This fucker’s big enough to swallow a grunt crusher whole, and that roof couldn’t support our weight, let alone sixty-two tons of Challenger Two.” Jones looked up to the gap in the roof. “Bollocks. Even standing on my shoulders, you’re not gonna reach that.”

  “Sarge, the entire US basketball team standing on each other’s shoulders couldn’t reach that!” Cox’s voice sounded strained. “Try radioing for help.”

  Jones pulled his comms out of its holder and depressed the squawk button. Nothing.

  Jones tried the radio three more times, battling to suppress a rising sense of panic. He didn’t like this dark, enclosed space, even if it was the size of a cathedral. He balled his hands into fists, trying to disguise the tremor that shook his normally steady fingers.

  Jones pulled out his mobile phone. “No bars.” Shit. Shit, shit, shit! He jammed the phone back into his pocket. So they had no comms, no way up to the surface, and nobody knew where they were. And… seriously, what the hell was that smell? “Cox, have you shat yourself or something?” Jones switched to breathing through his mouth.

  “Fuck off!” Cox’s voice was sounding more panicked by the second.

  Jones sniffed again and almost threw up. The smell was getting stronger… and now he recognised it for what it was. It was the same stench that had hit him like a wall when he’d walked into that Taliban slaughterhouse in Helmund. It was the smell of decomposing flesh, body fluids and putrefaction. “Jesus!” He gagged and put a hand over his mouth. It was coming in waves now, and it was worse every time they moved. “Stand still, Cox.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stand still!” Jones aimed his headtorch at the floor and nearly vomited on the spot. In the bright, white spotlight he could see the entire floor was slick and covered in slime. It had a marbled appearance, with swirls of darker patches in a larger expanse of paler fluids. He crouched and touched a gloved finger to the floor. As he brought his hand back up, a strand of jelly-like goo stuck to his glove, the viscosity the same as baby snot. He stood and flicked the disgusting stuff off his glove. He knew exactly what the slime was. And it wasn’t baby snot, that was for damn sure.

  “Sarge…”

  “Easy, Cox. Easy.” Jones could now hear genuine fear in Cox’s voice. Not so cocky now, are you, you smart-mouthed little shit? he thought viciously. But the newbie was under his protection, despite his earlier and deeply disturbing mental image of ripping the son of a bitch’s heart out of his chest. His job now was to get them out of here, and quickly.

  Jones stood in the middle of the chamber, directly underneath the hole that led to the outside world – a world where the floor wasn’t coated with the rotting remains of decaying bodies. A world where the darkness didn’t press in on you like a vice. A world where horrific thoughts of disembowelling your fellow man could be dismissed as a sick by-product of PTSD, and talked through with a shrink over a nice cuppa and a biscuit. In here, in the womb of the earth and so close to the ritualistic carnage that had saturated this landscape in blood for centuries, the familiar form of an SA80 didn’t seem to be such a comfort.

  Jones tried to quell the panic he felt was about to hit him like a tsunami. He scanned the chamber, and the spotlight of his torch revealed a stone-lined wall so well made you wouldn’t be able to get a blade between the unevenly shaped slabs, let alone your fingertips. As he did a three-sixty rotation, the torch beam landed on a much larger lump of stone and he stopped in his tracks. Carefully, in case the slime caused him to lose his footing, he made his way over to the massive stone.

  “Sarge, for fuck’s sake, talk to me!” Cox’s panic was now clearly audible.

  “Stop panicking, fella. We’re not dead yet. So calm down and breathe slowly. Preferably through your mouth. If you’re gonna throw up, do it in a corner. Somewhere I’m not going to step in it.” He ignored the sounds of Cox dashing to the side of the void and throwing his guts up, focusing only on the massive megalith in front of him. “We must be right next to the Henge. This looks like the arse-end of one of the Sarsen Stones.”

  “How’s that possible?” Cox spat the last remnants of bile from his mouth and straightened, feeling slightly better for voiding ration pack number sixteen out of his twisted guts.

  “What, you think the bloody things levitate, you daft sod? They’re buried into the ground, how do you think they stay up? There are legends about underground chambers beneath the Stones, but shit, I thought it was just a bunch of new age bollocks…”

  Jones slowly reached out his hand and brushed his fingertips over the surface of the stone.

  The jolt threw him backwards clear across the chamber.

  He landed and slid through the slime on his arse, trying to stop himself from slamming into the opposite wall. His headtorch went spinning across the floor, the light dancing and contorting like a ballerina on acid. It smashed into the side of the chamber, then blinked out. Jones finally came to rest a few inches from the wall, feeling like he’d just been hit with the mother of all tasers. He gasped, unable to get a lungful of the putrid air. Jones felt Cox cradling his head and heard the panicked man’s voice at the edge of hearing, but couldn’t respond. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and a million ants were crawling all over his body. He shook violently, his muscles convulsing and twitching as he tried to focus on bringing his breathing under control.

  “Sarge! Jesus Christ! Sarge!”

  The shock sent Jones’ brain into shutdown mode. His oppo’s words became muffled and distant, as if Cox was shouting at him from the opposite side of a parade ground. He wanted to tell Cox that he was okay, but that was a bloody lie. He quite clearly wasn’t. And Cox’s obvious inability to function under extreme stress was starting to send the younger man spinning towards full-on hysteria. Well, tough titties, kiddo. Your sergeant’s down. It’s up to you, now. It’s called ‘teamwork’, fella... Jones started to embrace the unconsciousness that kept threatening to overwhelm him…

  * * *

  Cox cradled Jones’ head, instinctively pressing two fingers to his neck to check his pulse. He felt about a hair’s breadth away from total pissing your pants and crying for your mummy meltdown. He held Jones in his arms, trying to comprehend what had just happened and to shut out the crushing fear that was filling him. He was not normally that bothered by the dark or enclosed spaces – he’d always believed that they were phobias only pussies got. But right now those pussy phobias seemed to contain other, more threatening horrors. Where were the bodies that had produced the copious amount of corpse fluids that turned the floor into a slime-covered, foetid skating rink? Why had his sergeant just been thrown across the chamber after touching the foot of the Sarsen Stone?

  And was his terrified imagination playing twisted tricks on him, or did a part of the blackness have a dist
inctly bipedal form?

  He turned his headtorch towards the spot, expecting the beam to light up a human form; please God, perhaps one of the 22nd who’d yomped down the hole and was going to pull them to safety.

  There was nothing there. The shadow form had slid sideways to just beyond the edge of the beam, away from the light. Still cradling the drooling, semi-conscious Jones in his arms, Cox swivelled his head, sending the torchlight scampering across the stones. No matter where he looked, that bipedal form was always just out of the path of the beam.

  His headtorch flickered and dimmed. “Oh, no, no, No! Shit! C’mon, do not do this!” He batted the side of the torch, willing the beam to power up again, but the torch suddenly winked out. The chamber was plunged into darkness. But at last a shred of his training kicked in as Cox remembered his NVGs perched on his helmet. He flicked them down and suddenly looked out into an eerie, vivid green chamber.

  Glancing down, he could see the prone body of Jones, still shaking and convulsing. “S’alright, Sarge, you’re gonna be fine. Take it easy.” Cox took a deep breath and tried to stop his own hands from shaking so violently, afraid he’d drop Jones’ head and shoulders back down into the slime that covered the floor. Cox shifted his weight and positioned his thigh underneath Jones’ shoulders, keeping the man’s head and neck clear of the ooze. “Easy, Sarge. Easy. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?” Cox frantically scanned the chamber. It was huge – far bigger than the limited glow of the headtorches had revealed. The night vision goggles allowed him to see details, but still there was something just at the edge of his peripheral vision – something that seemed to be taunting him in a sick game of Marco Polo. Wherever he looked in the chamber he could sense it…

  He looked down again at Jones. “Sarge, c’mon, stay with me!” He slapped Jones’ face gently, garnering a moan in response. “Sarge, hey, Sarge…” Cox looked up – straight into the wild, staring eyes of a massive figure. “Jesus Christ!”

  He scuttled backwards, ignoring the crack as Jones’ head hit the hard stone floor and propelled himself away from the figure. Gun! Gun! Grab your gun! He swung the SA80 up, and then realised that it would probably be more effective as a club. This was not a live ammo exercise. It was a ‘shit and thunder’ romp across the Wiltshire countryside, with plenty of flash-bangs, noise and piss and not much else. The SA80’s magazine was full of blanks, which made it about as much use as chucking confetti at a seven-foot tall… what?