by Mat Nastos
Gabcik wasn’t as easily convinced.
Positioning himself in front of the much larger man, agitated and attempting to puff himself up as much as possible, Gabcik poked Grimm in the chest forcibly. “Why are you so eager to kill your own people, your own countrymen? Why would a German seek the death of those who rule his homeland? Why should we trust you?”
“Trust? I care less for your trust than I do for you.” The big man loomed over the Czech rebel like a thundercloud. “Know this, little man, the Nazis are not of my home. They are foul blights on the earth. And if I fail in my Lord Odin’s mission it will mean the end of the world.”
A half grunt escaped from MacAndrew before the Scotsman could stifle the laugh that bubbled up from below. He was pretty sure the only thing more gargantuan than the German’s tree trunk-sized biceps was Grimm’s rather over-inflated sense of self-importance. Sure, the Germans were heartless bastards. And sure, Europe – and most of the world – had been nearly brought to their knees by the Krauts over the past four years of conflict, but now that the Americans had joined the war effort, the Allied forces were sure to stop the German machine. It was only a matter of time.
Before MacAndrew could properly vocalize his thoughts on Grimm’s perceived over-reaction, a strange light began to fill the room. A light that poured off of the runes lining both Grimm’s right arm and the mirroring symbols etched into the surface of his ancient, hand-wrought girdle. His hand flicked over the wood and metal handle of the weapon mounted rigidly in the sheath upon his waist. As if in echo, an unearthly humming, almost a singing, pierced the air.
“You fools! We’ve been discovered!” was all Grimm’s deep baritone could pronounce before a harsh German voice from the street just outside the church’s stone walls shrieked out, engulfing the room in chaos.
“Feuer Frei!”
CHAPTER 8
AMBUSHED BY THE PUPPETMASTERS
One of the least-often commented-upon skills gained by a soldier with any sort of combat experience was the ability to quickly and effectively identify the size and type of ordinance being fired at them. As a young infantryman in the British Expeditionary Force’s Second Army during the Great War, Ian MacAndrew had been involved in many a drinking game utilizing that very skill while stationed deep behind French lines. Nothing passed the time between charges and retreats better than downing shots of whiskey amongst bomb bursts and machine gun fire. The youthful, fresh-faced MacAndrew of 1917 had fast earned the reputation of being a poor judge of what was being shot. In truth, however, he was an expert at identification, but losing the game resulted in a belly full of whatever cheap booze was on hand and, nearly as important, a good night’s sleep.
Even after twenty years spent well away from any sort of active battlefront, Captain MacAndrew was able to readily identify the 81.4mm caliber rounds pounding into the stone masonry of the church by both the whistling of their approach and the echoing thunder of their impact as coming from the eight-centimeter Granatwerfer. It was a most-effective weapon when the krauts needed to grind a stationary target to fine powder and unrecognizable ash.
None of this information did anything to ease the effect of high-explosive mortar rounds detonating a few meters away from the Scot’s position. In fact, all it really did was notify the man that a battalion of Nazi soldiers was somewhere within a thousand feet and fully aware of his position.
The first mortar strike was, by far, the worst of the bunch. Even with the warning shout by the German commander outside, the giant shell’s explosion rocked the centuries-old building to its foundation, threw the rebels inside off their feet, and caused a ringing numbness in the men’s ears that blunted the effect of the next blistering attack that followed.
“It sounds like they’ve got at least two Panzers out there.” MacAndrew shrugged down low as another round of artillery thudded into the building, sending white stone dust and chunks of mortar the size of his fist falling down around him. “Mortars and who knows what else! The damned krauts have brought in some heavy firepower to deal with us!”
“The Nazis have not come alone, little Celt,” growled Grimm, surrounded by an ever-increasing glow pulsing from his ancient belt. “They’ve brought something with them far worse than guns or tanks.”
The thought was beyond MacAndrew’s comprehension and he just stared blankly at Grimm as the big man slid an ammunition magazine from somewhere in his belt and removed a well-worn sack, no bigger than an apple, before dropping both items onto one of the altar tops. Calmly and deliberately, as if he had all the time in the world and hundreds of pounds of German firepower wasn’t being blasted into the rapidly disintegrating walls of the church they were hiding in, Grimm unholstered the massive pistol from his side and emptied it of its ammunition. The move stunned the Scotsman completely.
MacAndrew asked, dumbfounded, “What’s worse than guns or tanks?”
Looking up from the enormous gun he had begun loading with odd, thumb-sized slugs covered in the same strange writing etched into his girdle, Grimm called out to Kubis between the screams of mortars bursting around them. “You, into the high belfry… tell us what awaits outside. Hurry!”
The small, intelligent eyes of the youth flashed to latch onto the emerald green ones of his commander with a silent search for approval.
“Do it, lad,” answered MacAndrew with a nod that sent Kubis scurrying off through fallen stones the size of automobiles before vanishing into a cloud of thick, white dust that clogged every inch of air inside the besieged church. “What kind of shite are we into here, Grimm?”
Completing his task of rearming his Mauser, Grimm edged his way over to the front of the church. His only response to MacAndrew was a jerk of his head up toward the bell tower where Kubis had disappeared.
The big man’s meaning was clear to MacAndrew. Their lookout would be able to better answer any questions he might have. “What can you see up there, Kubis?”
The reed-thin voice of Kubis called down from somewhere far overhead, informing his comrades that a hundred Nazis or more filled the streets lining the church’s perimeter. Two Panzers sat farther back down the block.
“Do you see anything else?” Grimm asked, gripping one of the fallen pieces of masonry in his hands. The rocks had to weigh three hundred kilos or more, but the German just grunted and lifted them in his arms. One at a time, he relocated the rubble into place against the cracking doors that threatened to give way at any moment.
Kubis answered in a negative before a volley of shots cut off the small man’s report. Snipers had a target lock on every window of egress from the building. They were trapped.
The eerie sound of soft voices singing too far away to make out, filled the room, somehow cutting through the crash of stone and wood, and the shrieks of mortar fire from outside. The beauty and unearthliness of the song stopped everyone in the room in their tracks. Everyone but Grimm, who continued his tireless task of bracing chunks of granite the size of a man against the quickly-disintegrating outer walls of the cathedral.
“What is that?” MacAndrew looked hard at his new comrade for the answer he suspected only the giant possessed.
“Megingjord,” answered Grimm, slowly sliding the long blade from its position strapped to the front of his waist.
The men spread out across the room, and all inhaled as one at the sight of the sword’s glowing blue blade emerging from its leather scabbard. The power of the singing intensified to where MacAndrew could almost make out the words being sung by immaterial voices in an ancient Germanic tongue. Grimm gripped the weapon tightly in his left hand, tilting its blade toward their unseen foes outside. As the blade swung toward the sounds of the Nazis, its radiance became almost blinding to eyes clogged with the darkness of dust and floating debris. “She sings in the presence of her enemies. She warns of something supernatural, something evil, close at hand.”
The worry building behi
nd Grimm’s icy blue orbs was palpable and it shook Ian MacAndrew to the core of his being. Anything that scared an unshakable warrior like Grimm wasn’t something the Scot wanted to see up close.
“Bar the doors! We’ll make our way out through the cellars below!” shouted MacAndrew. If all else failed, they could hide in the tunnels beneath the church and pray the Germans didn’t find them. “Move!”
“It is too late. They come!” Grimm’s bellow of warning was overwhelmed by the sound of thunder hammering into the walls leading to the street outside.
Spider-webs of fine cracks began pushing in through the church’s thick stone walls. Cracks that quickly grew into thick crevices with each thud. A chunk of rock the size of a baseball nearly removed Jozef Gabcik’s head when a particularly vicious strike shattered a supporting brace and sent it flying wildly across the room. The nervous Czech rebel was saved from beheading only by his twitchy nature, but not from a wicked gash across his forehead that bled far worse than it really was.
“Get down!” MacAndrew’s voice was harsh from stress and from the strain of the fine, chalky dust of shattered stone clogging his throat.
A pulsing radiance of white light began filling the church’s auditorium, beating with the sound of the attacks as it grew in strength and brilliance. By the time MacAndrew turned to discover the source of the glow, it had blossomed to the strength of the noon-day sun. The source dropped the soldier’s jaw down to his chest.
Standing, arms spread wide and with his monstrous right hand closed around the leather-wrapped handle of his short sword, Grimm shone with the silver light of a day-star. Along his arms and girdle, runes burned with blue flame. The German’s radiance seemed to be in a fight against the darkness oozing in from the handful of holes punched though the church’s once-glorious facade.
“Steel yourself and have your men prepare to face death!”
The walls finally collapsed from the devastating onslaught, and the terrors that strode through were ripped from the most horrifying of childhood dreams. For a moment, as he watched them clamber through the rubble, the Scotsman’s brain refused to allow itself to process what his eyes were screaming they saw.
Nightmares weren’t real. They couldn’t be.
“Dear God.”
Tears ran down MacAndrew’s face once his mind returned to its senses. The monsters, three in number, were formed of masses of bodies molded together at weird, unearthly angles. Heads and arms and legs jutted from where they shouldn’t be, and the flesh of the creatures seemed to ooze and twitch, almost molten in nature. Pieces of gore and muscle dripped from one only to be absorbed into the un-living mass of the abomination behind it.
Heads – five or more crowning each figure – jerked forward, looming high over powerful legs formed of an unknowable number of limbs, and reaching a height of twelve feet or more. Bloated torsos, the skin of which stretched and pushed as if something from within was attempting to escape, had to weigh as much as a full-grown hippo. A hundred soldiers, dressed in the black of the SS, milled just beyond the jagged breach in the despoiled walls of the desecrated holy edifice… none eager to enter the building the monsters had bulldozed their way into.
“I fear your god has fled this place, little Celt!”
The howl of countless tortured souls shrieked in unison from the mouths of the behemoths trampling over fallen masonry and detritus. Surprisingly, little Gabcik was the first of the fear-addled men to react, opening wide with gunfire from the Sten gun that had been his most-constant of companions since he had left training in the British Isles. The man’s aim was true, blowing the jaw off of one of the heads of the closest beasts to him and knocking divots the size of a man’s fist in a tattered line across its chest.
The wounds were enough to kill a normal man or stop a charging rhino.
It wasn’t enough to slow the monster’s approach one iota. With a claw made up of jutting bones, serrated and wicked, the creature answered Gabcik’s attack with one of its own, slashing with a speed that belied its gargantuan size. The swipe was intercepted by the length of Odin-blessed steel that was Balmung’s luminous blade, and backed by the granite muscles of Grimm’s forearms. A flick of the man’s wrist sent nearly a meter of the demon’s arm flying, spraying whatever foul-smelling ooze that ran through its veins across the building, coating everyone – friend and foe alike – in its stench.
“Save your bullets for our human foes! Only the edge of Balmung will have a chance against the necrogolems!”
As if unmarked by the fear or doubt of mortal men, the pale warrior, incandescent with the gleam burning from the markings on his body, hurled himself into the path of the inhumanity bent on their destruction. He landed punches and kicks strong enough to shatter stone, and sliced with his sword in a ballet of violence that was equal parts beautiful and terrifying.
“The German is going to do it! We have a chance!” cried Gabcik from his position behind a stack of upended pews.
Shaking his head, MacAndrew knew better. “No… Grimm is slowing the things down, but I don’t think he’s doing them any sort of permanent damage. Any piece he cuts off one just gets reattached to one of its fellows.” The Scot gestured to a gore-coated torso a back-handed sword stroke from the fighting giant had removed from one creature as it twitched and continued to move. An instant later, it flowed and merged into the quivering form of a second monster.
The rise and fall of Grimm’s chest began to quicken, his body needing more and more oxygen to help power his defense against the relentless assault of the reanimated corpses sent by what had to be Nazi warlocks. Parries and counter-attacks, once blindingly fast, now began to slow, if only slightly. But still the monsters continued their own blitzkrieg, unaffected by the weaknesses of frail human flesh. None of the – necrogolems? Is that what Grimm had called them? – seemed to have need of breath or rest. They were juggernauts given form and set loose upon the world.
Wounds, small at first – mere nicks and scratches to begin with – began to build across the arms, chest, and face of the embattled Grimm. One or two meant nothing to the man, but dozens were scored upon his skin. His blood began to flow freely, streaming down his torso to slick the shattered marble floor beneath his feet. Still he fought on, empowered at the thought that to fail would mean the end to his life, and the end of his sacred duty to the man’s All-Father.
Soon, even the eldritch-enhanced muscles of Grimm failed. A backhand swipe from the largest of the walking corpses ripped through the warrior’s defenses, knocking his brilliant blade to one side before slamming into Grimm’s chest with the force of a charging bull.
From his position nearby, Ian MacAndrew finally broke the spell of horror that had cast him into a role of inaction and cried out for his new friend. If Grimm fell, then the Scot and his men wouldn’t be far behind.
“The puppeteers! Kill them or we are all lost!” Grimm bellowed, allowing the razor-sharp edge of his enchanted blade to cut harshly into reanimated flesh, backing off the creature that had surprised him.
A torrent of gunfire followed the Scottish soldier as he darted toward a rack of weapons still thankfully untouched by the carnage happening around it. The hot rounds peppered the lumbering bodies of the necrogolems filling most of the gap between the church interior and the killers waiting outside. A quick prayer formed on MacAndrew’s lips, hoping the Nazi attack would take out the atrocities.
No such luck. The wounds inflicted by the beasts’ comrades did nothing to slow their relentless assault on the glowing German.
“Find the puppeteers!” Grimm’s deep voice followed MacAndrew on his dodging run through the main floor of the church up to the half-destroyed staircase at the building’s rear, Karabiner 98k sniper rifle in hand. A third floor window had been punched out, and MacAndrew settled against it.
One eye pressed against the high-powered telescopic sight mounted to the top of the rifle gav
e MacAndrew a clear view of the street below. Things were worse than he had imagined. Two-hundred Germans or more massed along the streets, all heavily armed and waiting to rush in once the trio of necrogolems had finished their work on the rebels. Fifty yards down, at either end of the wide avenue that stretched along the front of the church, were twin Panzer IV tanks, rumbling under the power of idling three-hundred horse-power engines. Their 7.5cm KwK40 main guns swung and aimed dead center of the structure where MacAndrew and his friends were making their final stand.
To Ian’s eyes, it seemed like the mammoth cannons were aimed directly on his position, even if he had little reason to believe the Germans knew where he was yet.
Yet.
That was all about to change, though.
MacAndrew licked his lips and scanned the surrounding landscape. A lieutenant here. A captain there. A colonel standing a hair’s breadth too far away from cover to be safe. So many targets and so few rounds left. But none were what the Scot had been sent to find. What was it Grimm had said? Kill the puppeteers? He had no idea what Grimm had meant by ‘the puppeteers’, but if the giant felt they were a threat then by God he was going to take them out.
MacAndrew squinted hard, trying to ignore the sounds of the other-worldly conflict playing out below him by demons from hell and a man out of myth and legend. Where were they?
Somehow, over the din of battle, a song flitted its way from the ruinous boulevard below and up into the ears of the highland warrior. No, not a song. Chanting in a language too obscene to have been formed by human lips.
Where?
There! Just across the street, less than a stone’s throw away from the entryway below. The puppeteers!
Three men dressed in tattered robes, with every inch of their flesh hidden by dirty-gray cloth bandaged about arms, hands, necks, and faces. The only thing peering back from the acres of cloth enveloping the men – if they were men, MacAndrew couldn’t be sure, even with the aid of his sniper’s scope – were red orbs, gleaming madly in the gloom of night.
