by Dirk Patton
I started breathing faster. My chest got all tight inside. Through the radio I could hear Preacher whispering his prayers on his beads and Sharkey started to babble again.
Then flak got closer, louder.
The Belle shook, then another thunderclap, this one sounding like it was right outside the door. The Belle rattled and screamed as more flak blew up in the air and peeled the skin off the bird.
Then the flak hit everywhere. A hundred booms, bangs, and big black bombs, all up and over. Flak ain’t some Jerry pointing his .30-cal at you and pulling the trigger. In daylight you can see a hundred, maybe a thousand pockets of black air booming around you, and any one of ‘em kills you if it’s close enough.
I looked back; Zeke was calm, like he near always was. The others?
“Fuck the flak, fuck the flak, fuck the flak, fuck the—”
“Se do bhetha, a Mhuire—”
“Goddamn that’s close! Crazy fucks!”
An explosion rent the air, and the Belle lurched like it had been punched.
“Cap, I heard something tear off the . . .”
“FUCKFLACK!”
“Stay on target!”
“Ata lan de ghrasta…”
“Can’t we shoot ‘em? Can’t we . . .”
“Steady, boys! Eggs?”
“Close, Cap. Less than twenty!”
The next burst shook the whole damn bird.
“FUCK!”
“Closing in, boys,” said Cap. “Sharkey, shut up. Eggs, get down there and start talkin’ to Norden.”
Eggs had already jumped from his co-pilot seat to move down beside Booger in the nose. Eggs was a cool, quiet guy. Had no trouble aiming then dropping as we got close. Me, I liked gunning way, way better than egg-dropping.
He sat and looked in the Norden bombsight, spinning the dials like a science guy playing with a microscope.
“C’mon, honey,” he said, his eyes hidden by the viewer. “C’mon, where’re ya hiding? Where you at? Inputting altitude . . . heading . . . estimated windspeed . . .”
I was already at the spot where Wrenchie would’ve usually been, getting ready to pull the levers and drop the payload.
“Aaaaaaaaand... NOW!” Eggs shouted, and you could hear just a little of the New York in his voice he’d tried so hard to get rid of ever since he’d gotten here. I pulled, the bombs slid down with that scream of metal-on-metal you never get used to.
“Turning around,” said Cap over the horn as soon as the bombs dropped out of sight. Eggs was already heading back to the cockpit. We saw the flashes, but we almost didn’t hear the bombs go off over the sound of the engines and the yelling of Cap and Eggs.
You didn’t usually hear the bombs much, ‘specially when the wind was up and the engines were all in your ears. Maybe a muffled piece or two.
But we all knew when our bombs hit. Not just from the noise, but from the color the sky and the ground turned. It made this sick-lookin’ green cloud that got bigger an’ bigger until it looked like it hit the sky. Then the sky turned red, the kind’ve red blood looks like when it hits dirt and dries up a ways. My guts did a flip-flop, and I could tell by Zeke moanin’ into his radio that he felt it too. The whole damned world seemed to rise, fall, stretch and come back t’gether again, like a belch you just couldn’t quite make come up and out.
Then it was all done. We were back to seeing the black and hearing the engine and the whistling of the wind outside through all the holes in the Belle.
“Cap?” Booger whispered. “Cap? Whut… wuzzat?”
“Shut up and keep your eyes open, Booger. You see anything, anything moves, you kill it.”
“Even civvies?”
“I don’t give a fart in a hurricane if it’s your baby sister on her baptism day! It moves, you kill it! Copy?”
“Copy that, Cap.”
“Okay, listen up, ladies. I want battle damage and casualty reports, on the double.”
“Bombardier, OK.”
“Nose gunner, OK.”
‘Left gunner, OK.”
“Right gunner, OK.”
“Tail gunner, OK.”
“Belly gunner, OK.”
We waited a few seconds. “Radio op-engineer? Guys, how’s Wrenchie?”
I turned. In the dim moonlight I could see a dark stain where the blanket covered the hole in his chest the size of a fist. The flak jacket was great against small arms and shrapnel, but not when a shell from a Mister punches through your plane.
“Wrenchie didn’t make it, Cap,” I said.
Everyone was quiet. And we kept for home. My gut calmed, but we were all feelin’ pretty antsy. Even with no more Misters in the air, no more typewriter-sounds of ack-ack from below, we still all felt like there was an itch we couldn’t scratch.
Preacher came outta the tailgun and walked along the plank down the center of the fuselage, holding onto the cord for balance. He knelt best as he could, pulled out a little blue book and started mumbling prayers. He wasn’t supposed to leave his post, us being over enemy territory an’ all. But Zeke an’ me let it go, and Cap pretended not to notice. It made it better somehow, him doing that, and he went back pretty quick.
For maybe a half hour it was quiet, ‘cept for the rattling of the Belle, the roar of the engines, and the shriek of wind through her belly.
That’s when things got real bad.
“Bandits, up top!” Sharkey yelled from the dorsal gunner nest.
“FUCK!”
“Sonovabitch…”
“Se do bhetha…”
“Shut the fuck up. We got more Misters?” Cap said.
Then I saw ‘em.
“Shadows,” I yelled. “Shadows! On the goddam moon. See ‘em?”
Sharkey piped in, “They’s too small for Misters, but too big for pigeons. I... I dunno what in Hell they are, but they’s in the air, an’ they’s gainin’ on us!”
“Cap? What’s out there?” I hoped he couldn’t hear how scared I was.
“Shut up, Tap. Preacher? Wait ‘til they’re in range, then fill ‘em fulla holes,” Cap said.
So we waited. I could hear Sharkey breathin’ heavy. Tex was countin’ backwards. My heel kept tappin’ and tappin’ like it did when I got the shakes. Preacher in the tail started whispering in his radio, and I just knowed he was saying some more of those prayers he’s always saying with the beads. He said it helped him to not be afraid.
But this time, it didn’t help him pull the trigger fast enough.
The sound of flapping wings beat faster, closer, and the bandits dove right, just before Preacher opened up on ’em with his .50 cal.
“Tap!” Preacher screamed as I saw them flush over to my side of the aircraft. A hundred rounds of hot, shiny lead leapt from my gun, and two of ‘em come apart
“That’s two, Tap!” I heard Zeke yell from behind, and then I heard his own guns start chatterin’ with our new friends. He cheered – that meant he saw another one go down, maybe two.
Then Preacher started screaming.
“A dhia sabhail sinn!”
Everybody got real quiet. Preacher only started yelling Irish when he was real scared ‘bout something. Everybody shut up. Even with the engines and the wind, it felt like things just changed and we were playing a whole different game. The walls seemed closer and I wanted to take off my mask, no matter how little oxygen there was up here.
“Preacher?” I yelled. “You all right?”
He yelled something down the tube I couldn’t get.
“Par boiled?” I said. “Iissat more Irish?”
“No! That’s what they are,” he said.
I dunno. Hard boiled? Was it a Catholic thing? It made more sense later, but right then, in that moment, no.
Zeke’s browning suddenly started belching bullets and he cheered. “Got two,” he yelled. “Got two! I saw ‘em fall apart! Just like shooting clay pigeons back home!”
“Where?” Sharkey yelled. “I got nothin’ up here. They’s—”
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nbsp; We all heard the smash and shriek of metal as Sharkey’s canopy got ripped open, and the air started blowing all through the Belle. Then we heard Sharkey screaming, screaming like something was tearing him up.
Then he stopped screaming, and all we could hear was the wind.
Cap climbed down the steps, then ran four more big, leaping steps to the dorsal gunner’s stepladder. His face was white, and his eyes were red as a Christmas fire.
“What the fuck?” he shouted. He got to the ladder, stepped on the first rung, and wiped something out of his eye.
He blinked, and wiped again. I turned and got a closer look. There was a long, red string, like a long piece of spit, dangling down and splatting in Cap’s face.
And sitting on the floor where Sharkey’s boots shoulda been was a little white blob with a dark spot on it.
Sharkey was gone, and he’d left his eyeball behind.
Cap didn’t panic. He pulled his piece and pointed it straight up as he climbed the ladder.
He poked his head up there a minute, maybe more. His legs stood still and straight then he stepped back down slow, bloody prints from his shoes leaving rust-colored streaks on the ladder rungs.
“Sharkey’s gone,” he said, his voice raised just enough so we could hear him over the wind blowing through the destroyed canopy.
He shut the door above him. A small line of red moved around the rim of the hatch.
Cap’s eyes just got real wide, like he’d just figured out something that scared the willies outta him. “We gotta get back,” he said, and ran for the cockpit.
“Eggs!” he yelled, jumping up the ladder. “Hit it full throttle! Get us outta here, now!”
“Cap, all due respect—”
“Eggs!”
“Cap, at full throttle, we’ll let every ack-ack, fighter—”
“EGGS!”
“and EVERY GODDAMN FARMER in the FATHERLAND, CAP, is gonna HEAR US AND START SHOOTIN’! Remember the Cat’s Eye? The Lucky Seven? They went full throttle and they got—”
Cap pulled his pistol and pointed it at Eggs. “Direct order, Eggs,” he said all quiet.
Eggs paused just one second, looking at Cap’s eyes that’d gone all narrow. We could all see him from the tube – they been so loud we’d heard the whole thing, and we could read his last words on his lips.
“Goddam death sentence!” Eggs said as he pulled the throttle.
“We already got one a’ those, Eggs, if we don’t shake these things! Now move it!”
Now the engines started roaring even louder, and the Belle started rumbling hard enough I thought it was gonna shake itself to. . .
Oh shit… I saw it through the cockpit window, right in front of Cap.
Two bright red eyes looking in at him.
And a smile. Big and white like a crescent moon.
“CAP! In front!”
Cap looked forward and roared, pointed his pistol and started panic firing out the window. Stars and spiderweb cracks bloomed like sick white flowers on the window in front of Cap and Eggs. Eggs screamed, and the face dropped outta sight.
“Cap! What the fu—”
Now Booger started screaming below them in the nose gun. Then we heard another crash and more wind, and Booger stopped screaming.
“Gunners!” Cap yelled. “Gunners! Into the fuselage!”
Preacher’d just gotten through the hatch from the tail, and Tex was coming up through the ball-turret when we heard more glass breaking near the back of the bird. Preacher’s face was ghost white, his eyes wide as dinner plates. He was scrambling on his hands and knees, one hand held his beads in a dead-man’s grip, the other hand was grabbing and clawing the walls, the steady cord, the floor, anything to pull himself forward and away from what was behind him while he gibbered and blubbered, hollering louder than even the engines and the wind. “It’s coming!” he yelled. “It’s coming! IT’S COMING!”
And then I saw it.
Whatever it was scrambled after Preacher into the fuselage. And it wasn’t like nothing you ever saw before. I thought at first it was like a giant bug, what with those big black eyes with red glowing behind ‘em. But then there was the teeth, they unfolded out of its mouth like a mix of knives, spikes and long, sharp needles. And even though its mouth was open, we couldn’t hear no sound. It looked like it’d roar at us if it could, but it couldn’t.
And the horns, they warn’t like the little curve jobs they got on Halloween costumes. Nossir, these were big jobs, the kind you’d see on a Memphis bull about to gore you through the gut for just lookin’ at him wrong.
Preacher scrambled past me, still yellin’. I stuck myself in a little door space where Wrenchie kept his stuff, and watched the thing crawl past me, squirmin’ and writhin’ like a sidewinder. I warn’t being a coward but thinking I could attack from the rear when I had the chance.
I wish now I’d been thinkin’ straighter, but I wasn’t. None of us were. I grabbed the biggest wrench I could find, but when I poked my head out, Preacher had slipped and fallen. He turned over quick but the thing was on him, ripping at his chest and making blood splash on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Preacher was screaming in a high, shrill shriek while his chest and guts all got stripped away like cheap wallpaper off a barn door.
No.
Not Preacher.
Not after Shark, Booger and Wrenchie.
I started throwing every tool I could at the thing while Preacher’s blood sprayed around me. Everything bounced off the thing. Nothing worked. The walls of the Belle were getting tighter and tighter. I couldn’t breathe. Then I could and I wished I couldn’t, because I could smell Preacher’s blood and shit as his guts got opened up.
It all happened in maybe five seconds, but then I saw Preacher look at the beads in his right hand just long enough to stop screaming. He looked back at the thing and started slapping it in the head with his right hand, doing the worst, weakest punches you ever saw. But… but the thing winced, and backed off just a little, then shook its snout like a dog that’d been slapped upside the head.
Preacher didn’t scream now. He roared. Roared with what was left of his throat and kept hitting the thing. I saw little pieces fly off it like sand where he hit, and that took all of another two seconds.
The thing looked down at Preacher, and its eyes got so red, so help me God, it lit up the inside of the Belle like a lantern. Its teeth unfolded and was about to chomp down on Preacher’s face.
Then Cap screamed. It warn’t a scared scream, but a mad one. I’d seen Cap mad before, and I knew what made him madder’n anything was someone acting wrong on his plane. He pointed his gun and emptied the clip into the thing’s face. Behind him, Eggs had grabbed the fire extinguisher and started blasting at its eyes.
Nothing happened.
Not on the monster, anyways. The Belle was goin’ crazy; the engines were making me deaf, and I thought I could see the treeline through all the holes in her side. The wind wasn’t frostbite-cold this close to the ground, but it was still cold enough to feel against my face and through my gloves and jacket. The Belle started to rock back an’ forth, making it tough to stand straight. Eggs must’ve hit the autopilot, but it sure didn’t feel that way.
The thing’s face jerked a little with each hit, and then it got all covered in the white stuff. But before it got all hidden I saw little bits of its face get chipped away like a claw hammer hitting granite.
It didn’t stop the thing a bit. It couldn’t move forward, on account of Preacher’s body and Eggs and Cap blockin’ its way. Now that it was out of the tail gunner pit, we could see why it’d been able to keep up with us. Its wings grew out of its back like an angel’s, but they were huge and grey with black ribbing. Like a giant bat.
It had claws on haunches for legs, but it couldn’t stand inside the plane. It crawled, trying hard to move faster while looking for someone else to rip up.
And then I remembered what it made me think of. Last time I’d been in a big city –New Orlea
ns – there was a huge church down there. The kind of church Preacher said he’d gone to, all made up of stone, colored windows, and giant wooden doors.
And it had these funny looking monsters carved on top. They showed what you’d be like outside of Heaven, if you didn’t get your sorry hide into church and stayed good.
Well, this thing was one of those things. We’d bombed a church, one that Fritz’d been messing with big time. Whatever evil Fritz’d been doing down there made this thing get madder ‘n a hornet in a kicked-up hive.
Though its head was all covered up, I could still see its body. Saw the thing flinch when Preacher swung and hit it again, pulling back just a little when Preacher hit it for the last time. He’d run outta gas, or maybe had just enough for one last shot. I heard him say somethin’ in the Irish – don’t rightly know what – but I bet now it was something to Jesus, or Jesus’ momma.
Eggs was still blindin’ the thing best he could, and the blast shot something right over the thing’s head and straight at me.
The monster’d taken one last good slash at Preacher and taken his hand with the beads clean off, and Eggs had blasted it right at me while Cap loaded another clip into his piece.
Preacher’s hand turned end-over-end. It was like slow motion – a long necklace of beads with a cross at the end.
I grabbed ‘em, had to pry Preacher’s fingers to get at ‘em, then let the hand fall. The beads was hard brass threaded on knotted paratrooper cord and tough enough to choke a pig. I figured I was gonna die, but I wanted to die like Preacher, fightin’ this sick and ugly bastard hard as I could until the Belle hit the ground. And I had the one thing I’d seen work on it in a fight.
Preacher’s getting killed pulled something loose in all of us. Cap was the only one with a pistol, and he kept shootin’. The other guys took whatever else they could. Tex was under it in the ball, tryin’ to stab it upwards with his kneecapper. Zeke had a torn-off piece of metal and was wavin’ it, tryin’ to get the thing to look at him while Cap shot and Eggs blasted. Everyone was screaming, louder than the wind and the Belle doing it’s roaring and rattling. The thing slashed at Zeke and slammed his shield, smacking him so hard against the wall he went down and I couldn’t see him in all the ruckus. We couldn’t see much ‘cept when Cap’s gun fired and flashed. There wasn’t much room and I don’t think anyone thought we’d survive much longer inside a plane with that ripping up the bird’s insides the way it was doing.
