Book One of Murphy’s War
By
Steven G. Johnson
PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press
Copyright © 2020 Steven G. Johnson
All Rights Reserved
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Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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To Poul Anderson, for Virginia Graylock and Steven Matuchek, and to Bill Mauldin, for Willie and Joe.
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Cover design and original art by Elartwyne Estole
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Excerpt from Book One of The Shadow Lands
Excerpt from Book Two of The Fallen World
Excerpt from Book One of The Devil’s Gunman
Excerpt from Book One of The Darkness War
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I hear back in the Civil War, the men didn’t get much in the way of church service in the field. In this war, it’s much easier to assemble the men for the chaplain. Nobody wants to be left out.
“If the Lord is with us,” said Deacon Staddan, “who then can be against us?”
“Well, there’s the vampires, of course,” said Dave Zwergbaum under his breath. “And the mummies, the zombies, the werewolves, the wasps, those tree guys, the evil dwarves, evil gnomes, evil dwarf-gnomes, and whatever that thing was in the Rhine that time. But besides that…”
I nodded, which probably seemed like I was agreeing with the Reverend. Not that I wasn’t, mind you. But Dave was right, too, mostly. He’d left out the forest maidens, the reanimated corpses, and the Austrian airdrakes, which were more like dragonflies than our snakelike breeds. But if you really wanted to list all the things that Hell was throwing at us out here, well, it kinda ruined the point of the joke.
* * *
Somewhere in Bavaria, late November, 1944.
I was trudging uphill through sterile gray mud when the ground started to erupt.
I hadn’t felt anything through the soles of my shoe-pacs. In wet weather, you often don’t. Nobody had that instant of warning to stand up as straight as a board and pull their arms in tight. It’s the exact opposite of what our dads had to do under fire, back in the First War, but I bet they’d recognize the shock.
In their war, the shells came from above. Back then, dwarves were cute images on Christmas cookie boxes or cheerful bakers with thick foreign accents. We hadn’t really gone to war with dwarves, well, ever.
Now, though, both sides have ‘em and both sides use ‘em. Our dads had to get used to aeroplanes making the sky their battlefield. We’re still getting used to the idea that the ground beneath our feet is the enemy’s hideout, and sometimes his highway.
Well, not my old man, personally. He’d seen it all. But dads in general.
Dirt and rocks sprayed out from underneath a deuce-and-a-half truck to my right front, maybe fifty yards away. Nothing nicked me, although a lot of mud splattered away from the bits. The truck sank, more like fell, nose-first into a sullenly slumping sinkhole.
Whump! Whump! Whump! Geysers of soil were bouncing up everywhere. The enemy had us exactly located, and his diggers were giving us Hell all across the encampment. The mud sparkled as the shrapnel hit; some of that stuff was quartz, maybe even diamond, flying almost as fast as a bullet. Maybe it’d shatter when it hit something hard, but the fragments would still bury themselves deep in your flesh if your last card came up.
I’m good with cards, so far. I wasn’t hit.
The airdrakes were coiling themselves up on the flight line, back of the ridge, while their ground crews fought with hoods and barge poles to straighten them up. A couple were already taxiing to get airborne, their pilots better at controlling them or just lucky enough to catch their mounts in a controllable mood.
The one that screamed over my head didn’t have a pilot, or even a saddle. So “controllable” wasn’t the most likely.
Meanwhile, the real dragons, the heavies, took the exploding chaos as a cue to settle old grudges with their bunkmates. The Armor pens were bouncing on their posts, more from the colliding six-ton animals scrapping inside than from the bombardment. An airdrake is heavy, sure, but they’re not all that solidly put together. Can’t be and still fly. So if you got in one’s way, he might knock you over, but you weren’t going to be hurt all that bad. Not at ground speed.
One of the big boys bumped you, with all those spikes and spines on him, and you were likely to get a ticket to the hospital or maybe find yourself standing tall before the Man, explaining why he should let you past the Pearly Gates in view of your record.
But I wasn’t running downhill, onto the flight line, or west, into the Armor paddock. Matter of fact, I wasn’t running at all. But as near as I could manage in deep mud, I was galumphing with huge cartoon steps up the hill, toward where K Company, 35th Infantry Division, was getting the pins kicked out from under it.
Wham! A ton of hillside tackled me around the waist, and I went down. I was rolling down a slope which was level a heartbeat before; a house-sized lump of soil had surfaced like an iceberg right where I was slosh-running. My helmet must have rolled away because suddenly everything was much louder.
Something bellowed and shifted its weight up out of the dirt-pile. A pair of dwarves, naked and brown and hung with tools, crumbled off the sides of the thing as it reared into the night. Mud flowed down its sloping sides as the rain hit it, revealing hardened coal plates underneath. It flexed its shoulders with a noise like scraping bricks.
Four arms rose from a barrel-shaped torso ribbed with dully gleaming rings. No eyes, naturally—this thing was pretty certain to be underground-only by preference. Complicated mouth parts on the top of the head, between the arms, opening and closing first side to side, then top to bottom, able to bite and chew in any direction. The wedge-shaped jaws didn’t meet at the bottom, leaving gaps for rock and dirt to tumble out. Like an earthworm, if earthworms could kill.
It opened its mouth, clenched its rings, and roared. I felt it harder in my boots than through the air. Then it flexed its four arms, and I heard that squealing scrape again, like nails on a chalkboard, followed by a very assertive crackling.
That’s the thing about animated golems—stone and iron, or in this case coal, don’t flex. Coal cracks, stone snaps, and metal, although it bends, stays bent. Bend it too many times, it breaks. So if you want your living statue to do much more than glare menacingly, you have to use sorcery to bend the limbs, which cracks ‘em, then use more sorcery to glue the limbs back together. With every motion, he was literally cracking his arms apart, then letting them re-grow. And maybe it hurt; that was up to his maker, not to him.
I could have done without the noise, though. It wasn’t up to me, either—my Maker had decided that eyes could be closed, but ears, well, them you’re stuck with. When the new arrival turned his claws once more, screeching and squealing through most of a complete circle, it sounded like that tool in music class which holds six sticks of chalk at once to make a scale. We’d discovered fairly early in our education careers that without the chalk, the steel frames made an even more dire noise.
I mentally christened him Chalky. In that same metaphorical breath, I decided Chalky must die.
Still, those blunt pincers on the end of his arms were surely able to rip through dirt and probably rock. I’m a lot softer than dirt.
So I fed him a clip from my Thompson chatterbox, trying for the weak points. Which I was just guessing at, because again, he tunneled through rock. There couldn’t be a lot of spots which would qualify as ‘weak.’
My experiment quickly eliminated the mouth, arms, shoulders, torso and, as Chalky heaved himself further out, legs as possible places to shoot him. The mouth, in particular, shed my bullets without trouble, one even whining as it ricocheted away from something hard inside.
Now I was empty, of course.
He turned toward me, I think. He didn’t really have a front. But now, instead of one arm jutting in my direction, there were two. With the other two arching over the head toward me, clashing fingertips that struck sparks off each other. I’d have done better to shoot a locomotive.
I could have backed up. I could have even more easily slid downhill, along with the mud and the rain. But the dwarves were the real threat here. As long as they were above ground, they had tools, brains, and opposable thumbs to wreak havoc on our guys. They’d probably go after our gear, of course, because without it, we were helpless. Soft pink grubs, wrapped in wet canvas, with teeth that had trouble with an army breakfast and nails that couldn’t open a tin can.
If it wasn’t for our brains, and those of the guys who invented all our gear, we’d be lunch.
Mr. Thompson’s brainchild might have been hot stuff for gangsters and cops, but it hadn’t solved the problem of Chalky here. I didn’t think Mr. Browning’s patented Moro cure, riding my hip in a leather-flapped rainproof, was going to do much better. It was just a different envelope for the same .45-caliber message.
I didn’t have a rifle; we didn’t issue them to sergeants in this new modern Army. It would have hit a lot harder, but Chalky probably didn’t have any vital organs, or organs at all for that matter. Sure, his alchemist maybe could have given him a heart or a brain. Did I know? I failed alchemy, then failed it in summer school. One of my cardinal virtues is consistency.
Chalky lurched forward, like he was falling on his non-existent face. He dug his claws into the earth, then dragged his stumpy legs back under him. So he was walking, if you wanted to call it that, like a gorilla with his legs in a cast.
In fact, I don’t think his legs even had knees. They were just pillars, thick as trees, to keep him up off the ground. For some reason.
His topple-and-drag move had brought him an unpleasantly large distance closer. He swept all four limbs to his right, making four gouges in the earth like a Sanskrit Sun-Sign. You know, like the Precognitive Corps uses. It’s on their collar pins.
He found a chunk of fallen tree, which he whipped up to throw at me. Possibly he was still sore from the Thompson-spraying incident. Fortunately it broke when he whipped it forward again, there having been a reason for it falling off the tree in the first place. Like the deacon says, everything’s got a reason. Sometimes, that reason is you.
Therefore, what he ended up throwing was about two feet long and an inch or so wide. I hit dirt anyway, slapping my palms on the mud. It went over my head.
But his other hand had found a truck, canted over on its side from falling into a sinkhole. It wasn’t the same one Chalky came out of; there were a lot of busy little beavers undermining our camp this night. Morning, really, I guess. Midnight had been a while ago.
Chalky clamped down on a wheel, twisted with a terrible squeak, and popped it right off the axle, tire and all. One of the nuts pinged off his hide with a refreshingly clean sound amid all the squealing.
Now he had a club, sort of. Or, if he were still feeling ballistic, a discus.
His elbow and his shoulder were about six inches apart. He flexed back, back, bending his arm almost double, and let fly.
He’d either practiced or been enchanted with accuracy; it came right at my belt.
Add to that, we weren’t that far apart. I’m a pretty nimble fellow, but Old Man Gravity wasn’t willing to drag my butt out of the line of fire fast enough. A willing enough helper, but slow to get started. Like me before my coffee.
Left and right looked good, but both my feet were rooted in thick, clingy mud with standing water swirling past on top. It was even money whether I’d slip or stick fast, but “none of the above” wasn’t the front-runner here.
So I couldn’t go down, left, or right. All that was left, or more honestly, the only idea I had left, was up.
I bounded like a jackrabbit on a hot stove. When you walk on snow, you press your feet straight down; walking in mud’s kind of the same. As is, I discovered, jumping in mud.
The tire whuckered under my boots, close enough to upset my posture. I sprawled in the mud, dropping the useless Thompson.
I realized, a bit late, that I could have described his weapon’s arc as the “line of tire.” I hoped I’d remember that gag when I told Dave about this, later. He’d get a kick out of it.
Chalky squealed in delight. I was helpless.
One of the dwarves had hightailed it while Chalky was flexing his yelling apparatus. The other one was in the hole, doing something with something to accomplish something. There were clinking noises and a nasty metallic stink.
I guess he wasn’t done with his task; I wasn’t dead yet.
So I scrambled on my hands and knees, hard right around Chalky’s squeals, to where I had a clear shot at the hole. He swung at me but missed, by a lot, vertically. Another sweep a foot lower, though, and I’d have been gravel.
My Colt slapped at my hip. .45-caliber bullets had certainly roused his ire, but didn’t look like they’d accomplished much else.
But you know, we’re up against a lot of different things up here on the Line. Behind them all, though, are the vampires. Who like to operate at night.
Which is why every G.I. above the rank of gee-Sarge-what’s-that carries a flare gun.
I popped a Green Star Cluster into the flare gun, sighted out of pure habit (there isn’t actually a sight on a Launcher, Signal, M3; it’s pretty hard to miss the sky), and thumped a sizzling mixture of magnesium, phosphorus, copper sulfate, and just a soup can of powdered aluminum into a hole that wasn’t more than five feet wide. It lit up like the Fourth of July, but underground, not overhead.
Maybe that’s how dwarves celebrate it.
If so, the dwarf in the hole didn’t like his patriotism so close to his face. He came up spitting, burning, dripping seething green glow from his head, beard, arms, chest, and even bare feet. He’d stepped on one of the packets on the way out, and now he left footprints of fire as he hopped around, slapping at the flames.
Chalky whistled like a scared locomotive.
I hadn’t had a plan, exactly, to deal with the colossus of living coal that was just this close to being within arm’s reach. His arm, not mine. But despite my unpreparedness, I’d apparently struck the fear of Someone into him, but good.
The next flare my mud-caked fingers grabbed was a red one. We use ‘em for signaling trouble, usually, or some predetermined signal during an attack. In general, though, if you hadn’t been told any particular meaning, red meant “something bad going on over here.”
So it was an inspired choice, to the degree choice had anything to do with it. Because the charge that was supposed to throw it a couple hundred feet into the air slammed it into Chalky’s coal armor, breaking the outer plates and burying itself out of sight.
It was already burning when it hit him. Then the main charge went off.
Red light exploded from his mouth and between the plates of his torso, like sunrise speeded up a hundred times. Chalky’s hoots became shriller. Then he improved on the train imitation by heaving about and running, arms flailing in the air, away from the burning dwarf. It was as bright as, well, a fiery place, and I guess his Coaly Majesty must have had some sort of visual sense after all, because he was too far away to feel the heat from the green flare.
Stands to reason a guy made of coal wouldn’t want to be too close to a fire. He was running from the one to his left; he wasn’t getting any further away from the one in his chest, but perhaps he thought he was.
Chalky stumbled, somehow, even without knees. The seams between his armor plates were sharply outlined in orange now, like the slots in a Franklin stove. Iron without showing a glimpse of the fire within.
I wasn’t sure if a flare would actually ignite him from a distance, but why not gamble with a couple? I loaded up again. He was still running, sure, but he wasn’t that fast. In fact, I thought I’d probably have time to deal with the dwarves and their gadgets before I finished Chalky off.
It’s not like I could lose track of him. Now there were blue flames licking out of cracks in his side every time he moved, and a continuous chimney-column of smoke and sparks shooting upward out of his mouth.
Something passed in front of the moon. Bat wings, elongated limbs, some kind of spear or halberd clutched in the claws on its feet. Vampire.
So that was what they were up to—disrupting our airbase from below so they could raid us from the sky. They weren’t necessarily coming after our air force; it was just as likely they wanted to wound our armor, or blow up the truck park, or any number of other vulnerable spots. We’re not all teeth, after all; a modern army needs an awful lot of soft-skinned tail to support the guys at the sharp end.
But their ground guides, all of them, had been panicked by the light of a single flare; I doubted they could see much of the red one, encased as it was by Chalky’s bulk. In its green acid glow, I saw other shapes running away, some low down like the dwarves, others bigger like Chalky. There wasn’t a one of them standing firm.
That seemed like pretty weak morale to me; if I had been asked, which I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have sent these particular guys on a raid like this. But maybe these were all the diggers they had. Just because the Enemy is ten feet tall, and superhuman, doesn’t mean he doesn’t make bonehead mistakes sometimes.
Tracers were peppering the sky, but it’s awful hard to hit a flying man, even at low speeds. And if one did hit, it usually went all the way through, which didn’t bother a vampire near as much as it does one of us breathing types. Being as how we have complete air supremacy on the Alpine Front—just look at the headlines—we didn’t have a dedicated anti-airmen outfit any more. Just a lot of guys with regular infantry weapons, swatting away at the sky.
But at least one charcoal-armored monster was hauling ass away from me as though I were the Risen Sun himself, and the dwarf on fire had stopped moving around. I couldn’t make out too many other details, but there didn’t seem to be any threats left on the ground.
I took my shot at Chalky and missed; he was bending over, or trying to, for all that he was an orange-lit shape in the darkness. He squeaked and hooted and hotfooted it away from my flare, anyway, shedding cinders and sparks.
So I dug in my musette bag, fed a handful of cartridges into the flare gun one after the other, and lit up the sky in green, white and saturated violet-red.
Of course, my flares didn’t come anywhere near the vampires circling for a landing on whatever their mission was tonight. But they didn’t need to. Like poor old Chalky, they flipped right out of their undead wigs and beat wings for their side of the Line, spitting faintly audible curses over the popping ground fire that we were putting up.
Like I said, everyone with rank on his sleeve has one of these dark-banishers. Soon flares were going up all over the camp. I heard the stonk-whomp of a mortar, and I grinned in the dark. The illumination rounds one of those babies throws weigh about ten pounds, which is a whole armload more than my little popgun packs.
Sure enough, the mortar bomb lit up the sky like the End of the World. The vampires fleeing back to the safety of their lines glowed red and green, sometimes both at once, as their hind ends flickered their long, ratlike tails.
Except for this one, off to the edge of the crowd, who folded in the middle with a startled bleat as one of our flyboys pounced his mount down on him. A flying vampire, all muscle and batskin, looks mighty mean in the sky, until you see an airdrake. He didn’t have much of a chance.
I guess Chalky got away; there wasn’t a horse-sized pile of burning coal anywhere on the field when it was over. Some of the emergence holes were mighty big, so he probably burrowed away back to safety. Or else the magic enabling him to live wore off, and he just crumbled to dust right there. Anyway, one way or another, he wasn’t making that screech any more. I’d take that as a win.
Back in the hole they came out of, I was starting to see the colors of the dead dwarf’s ornaments more distinctly now. A hazy gray was blending into the clouds, even as they continued to pour down rain. The airdrakes all crowed like drunken roosters with a speech impediment.
The raid was over. Another day was beginning on the Line. Time to get back to work.
* * * * *
The typewritten morning report, annotated in pencil by two different hands, claimed we had 36 effectives in K Company. I only recognized a few of the names we were supposed to have, and half of them were dead. Nor did it list some guys we actually did have.
I considered not signing it, seeing as its correspondence with reality was about thirty per cent. But send up an unsigned report, and pretty soon they’re questioning your fitness for command. I might end up not being responsible for all of my guys’ lives.
Which was tempting, but I signed it anyway.
It was getting hard to hold it upside down over my head, using the clipboard to keep the rain off. And of course, my fountain pen wouldn’t write upside down until I sincerely, humbly prayed for it to work this once. Also, I shook it, which puts my sincerity into question if you ask some of the sky pilots.
“I hear they got the new six-inch mortars up at Essen now,” Dave ground out slowly. He tilted his head down to keep his cigarette going in the rain, but his squared-off slab nose was doing that all by itself. The rain was lathering up the shaving soap he held in his blunt, massive hands, washing the latest layer of Bavaria off into the mud.
“Good,” I said. “Maybe they’ll grind up some decent potions for once. That stuff they sent up last week didn’t do anything but make my teeth green.”
“Ah, that’s the fungus, Murph,” Dave suggested. “Only greens we’re likely to get our teeth into for a while.”
I scratched at the gap between my front teeth. There wasn’t anything to say to that; it was the truth, pure and simple. Not “God’s honest truth,” though. Nobody would use God’s name to talk about Waldorfsbruck.
We were on the reverse slope of a hill, which was good and bad. Good, because the Austros couldn’t tell exactly where we were without sending over a broomstick, and with our Air Corps drake-jockeys watching over us, they weren’t likely to survive the attempt.
Bad, because the rain went past like a babbling brook, curling over every little rock and tent peg. Sure, the grass and bushes would hold the dirt down, but that was before the U.S. Army came stomping around in our shoe-pacs. We weren’t knee-deep in gluey mud, which was something. But we were ankle-deep in cold water, which isn’t any picnic either.
Plus, whenever the Enemy settled in for a while, everything else went gray and died. It takes a lot of cursing to keep a vampire officer up and at ‘em night after night. Takes even more to keep their mortal soldiers in line, when every decent instinct is trying to leap right out of their skulls and drag the rest of them along for the ride.
Of course they’re not all vampires. For one thing, who would they eat?
The Austro-Hungarian morale problem was less like our Army’s and more like that of our prisons, or our psycho wards. There’s one, count ‘im, ONE, Angel of Mental Stability in the whole of the Hierarchy, and don’t think for a minute he’s not half buggy himself from the flood of prayers he gets from our Invocational Warfare boys. Fighting the undead, we wind up with more head cases than neck wounds.
So all those evil spirits churning around get into the soil, see, and the trees, and whatever used to live around here, and it wears ‘em out.
Can a germ feel despair?
I don’t see it, myself, but I knew an open cut up at the front lines never got infected. Guys got sloppy about cleaning their mess kits and never a bellyache. Docs didn’t have to wash their gear in alcohol, even, although they did anyway.
Waldorfsbruck was dead. Deader than Caesar. Deader than chivalry, in fact, because there are still a few Knights of St. John around, holding back the Dark with their bulletproof crosses. Everything natural except us was dead, and we were trying mighty hard to make the UN-natural dead, too.
The unnaturals on the Enemy’s side, of course. Our golems and dwarves are just good Old Folk.
We were in Southern Germany, staring up at the same Alps as Hannibal. There were a few Germans in the Third Army along with us, but they weren’t even organized into divisions, just regiments and battalions with four-digit numbers.
At least the Alpine country didn’t have a lot of civilians around. Franz the Austrian had to truck in fresh blood for his troops, and we didn’t have to worry too much about maddened madschens running through the trees with their fangs out. Still, when the best you can say about a place is that the dead people generally stay quiet, you’re not really advertising its charms.
“So,” I said after I tracked down the last piece of breakfast, “how many guys do we really have? I make it twenty-one.”
“Twenty-some, sure,” Dave allowed after a pause for thought. “Twenty-two, I think? Woodhead’s back from the hospital. Simms and them’re at Mine Warfare School until, uh, the 28th. What’s today?”
“It’s right there at the top of the report,” I groused, to keep from having to admit I didn’t know the date, either. If it wasn’t right in front of my eyes, I wasn’t too good at remembering anymore. Late nights were beginning to do that to me. At thirty, I was one of the ancients on the Line.
“Can’t the Old Man get ‘em back early?” Dave said. “I thought we had our own dwarves for all that underground stuff.”
I chewed my lip, where a baby moustache was boldly defying regulations.
“Yeah, but dwarves,” I said.
Now, Dave’s a slab of hairy muscle with a haystack beard, but he knew I didn’t mean him. There aren’t many of the Old Folk left, although they’re more common in Europe than back home in America. We’d been around them some since coming Over Here, and they weren’t bad guys, just different.
You literally never knew where they’d pop up. We have maps, because the ground is flat and we can’t fly. They got map rooms, layered with different colors like a Dagwood sandwich. You can’t look at ‘em, you have to dig around in ‘em.
Always looking up, always crouching with their hands in the dirt. Always tasting everything. But not twitchy, like some guys get on the Line. The exact opposite, in fact. So quiet and calm that when they finally did speak, you couldn’t believe that down-in-the-well rumble was actually coming from them.
Also, I could never understand their accent.
“We gotta get better at this tunneling bit,” I opined. “There ain’t but so many dwarves to go ‘round. And the other side’s got most of ‘em.”
“Zat why their dwarves’re so much better’n our dwarves?”
“Mebbe,” I allowed. “And they’re trained better. Cuz Franz really trains ‘em, like dogs. Ours are free to do whatever they want.”
“S’what we’re fighting for,” Dave drawled out. “Ain’t it?”
“Not getting bit in the middle of the night’s the main thing,” I countered. “But, yeah, freedom. I guess. Hope someone gets some, somewhere. Cuz there ain’t an eye-a-newt of a lot of it in th’Army.”
I hear some guys back home think the way we cuss Over Here sounds sissified. Back there you hear “damn” and “Hell” right out on the street. They can go tell the Marines, the way I see it. Why give the Enemy any more ammunition?
I scratched a little—at least the lice died up here on the Line—and stood on an ammo crate to see through the rain.
There weren’t any trees left; the boys burned them for warmth before the place went gray. So it wasn’t hard to make out our tents, three twelve-man rigs and a Baker for the captain, if and when we got another one. We were down in a shallow swale that was pretty good concealment before the bushes died. As it was now, it was still cover from the chest down.
To our right was the silk-and-silver pavilion of the Excellent Master of the Oaken Hunt. The bodies of Austrian soldiers, their horses, and their dogs hung head-down from exquisite brass arches. The carbon-arc spotlight filaments were smoking hot; Elves like it bright. The stovepipe chimney was roaring, too, because Dwarves like it hot. And there were piles of slime in the corners, with a Troll wriggling fat and happy in each one, half in and half out of the tent.
I hear they call it coalition warfare.
Fear of the fey folk goes back hundreds of years, but we all have the same Enemy. If the vampires win, there’ll be no room for the other Old Peoples. Vampires can’t drink elf blood—safer to gargle with gasoline—and anyway, the spirits of nature can’t stand to be around the undead. So we’ve got that in common.
On the left was a funny-looking truck with a tarp over the sides for a lean-to. Those British guys with the berets. Bred to command. They can make you do whatever they want. Tell you to eat a live grenade and you’ll ask for seconds. Thing is, it doesn’t work so hot when your enemy speaks one of eleven different languages. The Austros deliberately keep their nationalities separate; you never know if you’re up against a Serbian regiment, or Galician Poles, or Ruthenians, whatever they are. Can’t understand your Voice, can’t obey it. There wasn’t generally a lot of work for the Commandos.
An infantry regiment has nine rifle companies, A through I. Then Headquarters is J-for-Juliet, the artillery is L, M, and N if you got your regulation three batteries, and Oscar Co. is transportation. Usually the engineer and signal assets aren’t a full company, so they’re part of Juliet. Sometimes there’s an armored company attached, but they’re all numbers instead of letters. What with most of the fighting being at night, every regiment’s had a reconnaissance company authorized for a while now.
That’s us, K-for-King. Three four-jeep platoons, four men to a jeep plus a lieutenant, in theory, for each platoon. Three hardback jeeps and two specially-sneaky trucks for a headquarters. We were supposed to have fifteen jeeps, but only six were running, because of tires. You know how they say “Mountains eat tires?” When the other side gets elemental dominance, that’s literally true.
But what was left of King Company could easily fit in our remaining vehicles. And of course, all the weapons of our full fifteen-jeep strength were sticking out of our six jeeps somewhere.
We were real short on officers, too. As in zero. With five stripes, I was senior man among the living, so until they slapped butter bars on some college boy, it was my company. King of the Kings.
We’re a reconnaissance company in theory. Most times, we’re the regimental reserve, the Colonel’s bodyguard, military police, and rock-straighteners. But once in a while, when the gremlins stop hexing our Jeeps, we go out and poke around to find out where the Enemy is and what he’s up to.
The Austros, the Strudels we call ‘em, we know all about. They have to have a vampire for every unit to keep their men in hand, so they move around in company-size clumps. Officer likes the night, but the men can only see in the day. So they move around at twilight, which is less than an hour in the mountains. Strudel units don’t have no mobility. Our overlays show every enemy unit in the valley. Every day.
But the real Enemy supplying the Austros with their magical oomph? They’re a little beyond my pay grade. Nobody knows how many Dark Forces there are, or what they can do. We don’t even know what they really want. When every demon with any influence in their ranks is both smarter than us and a psychotic liar, how can we trust anything we hear?
Well, yeah. We can trust one Source. But He doesn’t issue morning reports.
* * *
MORNING REPORT:
K Company, 134th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division Nov 22, 1944
Commanding Officer: none
First Sergeant: T/Sgt Murphy, M Prepared by: T/Sgt Murphy, M
Present and Fit for Duty: 36 Detached: 12
Hospital: 6 ?
CO HEADQUARTERS 8
Murphy, M. T/Sgt Heuchert, D. Leuders, D.
Byrd, T. Loftus, B. Cpl. Hickey, M. Kassock, I. Dalton, D.
1st SQUAD 8
Zwergbaum, D. Cpl Woodhead, N. Stevens, J.
Burgess, H. Van Deusen, B. Fitzgerald, K.
Hodge, J. Vollert, K.
2nd SQUAD 10
Nelson, P. Cpl Szymkovic, E. McNeill, O. Spencer, K. Lodge, P. Trasky, S. Rosetti, M. O’Connor, M.
3rd / WEAPONS SQUAD 10
Thomen, J. Sgt Larsen, L. Finkelstein, J. Pruitt, D. Hitchborn, M. Jasman, D. Ross, S. Hiney, R. Eveland, R. Perdue, J.
* * *
HQ THIRD ARMY TO CO 134 INF REG SENT 10 22 44 1823 ZULU
MESSAGE BEGINS:
SKINNY, YOU OLD DOG. ALWAYS KNEW YOU’D WEAR EAGLES. SORRY ABOUT MORTIMER.
CRYSTAL BALL CROWD THINKS YOU ARE NEAR SECRET ENEMY COMMAND FACILITY.
FOUR COLONELS, THREE BARONS, A COUNT, TWO DOCTORS AND A PROFESSOR POSTED THERE. THAT MAY JUST BE FOUR VAMPIRES, THOUGH, WITH SEVERAL TITLES EACH.
EXACT NATURE OF FACILITY UNCLEAR. PHRASE USED IS QUOTE NEUGEBORENFUHRUNGSBILDUNGSGYMNASIUM UNQUOTE. OUR TAME KRAUTS MAKE THAT AS TRAINING PLACE FOR FORMING NEWBORN LEADERS. BABY SHAVETAIL SCHOOL, PERHAPS.
YOU ARE TO CONFIRM OR DISPROVE ENEMY HQ IN HASSBERG. MAP REFERENCE 012749-376448.
IF CONFIRMED, ARTILLERY CONCENTRATION WILL SUPPRESS TARGET IN UPCOMING ATTACK. I NEED THOSE GUNS BADLY ELSEWHERE SO BE SURE BEFORE YOU CALL IT IN.
USE THE COMMANDOS IF THEY AGREE. WILL WORK IT OUT WITH MONTY LATER.
YOUR REQUEST MORE REPLACEMENTS AND ARTILLERY AMMO DENIED WITH REGRET. YOUR REQUEST TIRES EN ROUTE FROM ASCHAFFENBURG ETA 29 OCT 1944.
MESSAGE ENDS.
* * *
Our regiment had been commanded by Moe Mortimer, a light colonel who was a lawyer originally. Somehow the Enemy got hold of enough traces of his skin or hair to make a decent voodoo doll, though they call it something else in German. By the time he was ordered back to hospital for decursing, Old Moe was more pins than needles.
I liked him, for what that was worth. He wasn’t tough as nails, but he pretended to be for the doggies’ sake. Never forgot a face or a map reference. That meant he never had to bawl out a subordinate for failing to remind him of something. His command post was always friendly, even in an artillery storm. Nobody blew up around Moe—not emotionally, anyway.
It ain’t good when officers fight. Makes the guys think nobody’s in charge.
But now we had a full bull colonel again, Alastair “Skinny” Denton, West Point ‘21. He was a lot more formal than Old Moe.
“Sergeant, have you any men in your company who have been to Hab-berg?” the Colonel asked me.
“No, sir,” I said immediately. “I, uh, I don’t even know where that is.”
He looked up, startled.
“You’re with the reconnaissance company, aren’t you?” he snapped.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ve never heard of Hab-berg?”
“I’ve heard of HAM-burg,” I said, trying to be helpful. “But I’ve never been there. It’s a ways up north.”
“I know where Hamburg is,” he said. He poked a spot on the map.
“Oh, HASSberg,” I said helpfully. “The Krauts spell a double-ess like a funny letter B. Sure I been to Hassberg, sir. Well, not in it. But I seen it from this hill right over here.”
“There’s no hill on the map, Sergeant.”
“It’s not much of a hill, sir.”
He mused.
“Hass-berg…that means ‘Hateville,’ doesn’t it?”
“Hate Mountain, sir. ‘Burg’ with a ‘u’ is ville. ‘Berg’ with an ‘e’ is mountain.”
“Hate Mountain. But there’s no mountain anywhere near,” he said.
“Could be Hill 608, sir. It’s rocky. Or mebbe it’s rhetorical.”
“Rhetorical?”
“A flight of fancy, sir.”
“Nothing around here’s what it’s supposed to be,” he complained.
The colonel put a hand on the map to hold himself while he leaned way over to poke his finger at a mass of contour lines.
“I want you to send a patrol…here, to Hassberg,” pronouncing it as though he’d been doing it for years. Quick study.
“And one along this route between the crests, here, and another one here. Come to think of it, those are pretty big areas. How’s visibility up there?” he went on.
“Below the snow line? It’s bad, sir,” I said truly. “Lots of vegetation, lots of small outcrops. Above it, better, but…”
“No, you’d lose too much time moving up and back down, sergeant,” he said. “Remember, you’re scouting a path for the entire Third Army. Road bound supply columns, damn-near-road bound tanks. There’s no way we’re going straight over an Alp without roads.”
Some officers cuss because they think it makes them sound tough. He had a thousand soldiers under his command, near enough, plus tanks and artillery. I already thought he was tough.
But he was still thinking:
“Mm. Let’s send two patrols on each of the ways around the mountain. Still check out Hassberg, too. That’s five patrols altogether, can do?”
“We can do it, sir. That would be four men each.”
“What? Your authorized strength is sixty men!”
“Yessir, it is. My actual strength is 22, unless I lost one in the dwarf raid this morning.”
“But four men…! The book says eight to ten for a foot patrol; more in mountainous terrain, too.”
‘Mountainous terrain’ has a more military ring to it than ‘mountains,’ doesn’t it?
“Yessir,” I said again, because you just can’t go wrong with that. “You can pack a coupla BARs and a field radio that way, mebbe a 60mm mortar if you got a troll in th’patrol. Can’t carry a by-our-lady lotta ammo, though. But with four, well, it’s small arms with mebbe one BAR at the most. Guys gotta hump all the ammo themselves; can’t split it up too good with just three other guys.”
“If four men run into an enemy patrol…” he said. He was expecting something downbeat, but I surprised him.
“I like our chances, sir. Most of the men got automatic weapons by now, an’ we all have at least some combat experience…of course, if we hit a vampire or a werewolf, we get to become heroes. Posthumous ones, mos’ likely.”
“And rise from the grave after three days, spilling all our secrets to the Enemy,” he said.
“That hardly ever happens, sir,” I assured him. I couldn’t tell him never, now could I? Lying’s a sin.
“Well, how many patrols of ten men can you mount? Three?”
Optimistic math. And see above re: lying, sinful nature of. “Two, sir. Just two.”
“That’s not enough to cover all three objectives.”
“No, sir, it ain’t.” I agreed soberly. If the CO wants to complain, the CO gets to complain.
“All right, we’ll do it another way,” he said suddenly. “Take the whole company as a monster patrol…you know what I mean, a really strong patrol. Scout one or if possible both approaches, but be sure you reconnoiter that Hassburg place. Will that do you?”
“22 men, sir?” I rubbed my stubbly jaw. “We won’t be quiet, but we’ll shoot th’dickens out of anything we’re likely to encounter. An’ if we do hit an enemy battalion, well, we’ll hear ‘em before they hear us, mos’ likely.”
“Then you have your mission, Sergeant. Any questions?”
There weren’t, and I said so.
“Dismissed.”
* * * * *
Before we move out on a mission, we usually get attachments. Sometimes special weapons, more often, special men.
Every regiment since the Civil War was supposed to have three battalion doctors and three chaplains, minimum, with their support staff. In this up-to-date modern Army, they’ve added a radio outfit, some mechanics and drivers, more cooks, a fortune-teller, a danger senser, a healer, and a lucky man, one each.
We’d disbanded the special unit of guys with the Evil Eye—too much temptation to join the Enemy. And while there were plenty of card-slingers and spooks to go around, the Army always had trouble getting enough lucky men. We were limited to volunteers, because they just never seemed to get drafted.
Shame, really. The ones who did join always got medals.
Also, the majority of people with gifts—apart from mutts like me and Dave, with Old Folks for relatives—are women. We use ‘em, sure, as nurses, typists, and probably spies, too. But they’re not coming within a dozen miles of the Line. We’d rather do without a healer than let a dame run any risk of getting killed, never mind captured, in this kind of war. I eat up the pulp magazines, the crazier the better, but even with my overdeveloped imagination, I don’t want to even guess what the vampires would do to an American army dame if she fell into their hands. Any man doesn’t agree with protecting women and kids first is halfway to the Other Side already.
This time, our attachment was one guy.
“You are Technical Sergeant Mithrandil Murphy?” said a healthy specimen in spatter-camouflaged overalls. He asked the question the way a cop would—like he was challenging me to deny I was T/Sgt. Mithrandil Murphy.
“Mick,” I said. I didn’t salute—German ranks are strange, and anyway I didn’t feel like handing him the Top Dog medallion right off.
He carried a machine rifle across his chest, held there by a fancy sling rig, and had a bunch of little boxes slung over his back—tin can, leather box, some long skinny cartridge cases, and something that looked like a giant stick grenade. He had a knife in his left hand, which he was using to sharpen a big stick.
“Scharfuhrer Martin Brenner,” he said. “I am to guide you into Hassberg.”
He looked at me; he looked at Dave. He looked at me again. He didn’t say it, but he sure was thinking it pretty loud.
For people with such little countries, Europeans didn’t seem to mix as much as we did. I’m half a guy wide and Dave’s half a man tall. Our company had a Rosetti, a Finkelstein, an O’Connor, and a Pulaski, same as most outfits. Heck, the 77th Division, recruited in New York City, had a hundred languages among its ranks. But an Elvish-American and a Brooklyn dwarf together was a little unusual, even for Americans.
I pointed to the lightning bolts on Brenner’s collar.
“You Weather Corps? What are you doing running around in the woods?”
“Nein. The letters are SS.”
I saw it now. Felt kinda stupid. But Brenner was explaining:
“It means…protection squadron, you would say. We started as bodyguards for our leader.”
“But you ain’t anymore?” Dave asked.
“Nein. He died.”
“So, uh, what do you do now?” I asked. “You get another guy to protect?”
He grinned. “No. We still have the same. And we make sure his escort to Hell is as numerous as possible.”
Dave’s bulging fist came up.
“Hey, watch with the language, buddy! You know what you’re doing, cursing the guy’s name like that?”
“Oh, he knows. We are all going there. But we will have many, many servants when we arrive.”
Dave couldn’t let it go.
“So when you kill a guy, he has to work for you in the afterlife, is that the deal?” he asked.
Brenner nodded, agreeably.
Dave went on, “You better be right, pal. You just better be right. What if it turns out you owe him, instead of him owing you?”
“Ach, I had never thought of that! Thank you, Herr Corporal Doktor Professor, for your expert insight!” Brenner crowed. “Only, you know, this changes everything. Because, if my understanding of your well-reasoned thesis is in fact complete, then Hell will not be so pleasant,” Brenner said. “And so?”
“That’s what my uncle used to say!” Dave was off and rolling, German sarcasm notwithstanding. “And so? If you’re going to be punished anyway, why not give in to temptation? What can they do, hang you twice?”
Dave wanted to make sure Brenner understood him. He’d have made a heckuva schoolteacher.
“You see where that leads, Marty? Once you slip, just once, you might as well go ahead and become the worst son of a bulldog anybody ever saw, you follow me? What’s to lose? Thinking like that leads to a whole world of psychos.”
“But if you are damned, Corporal, and you know it? What then?”
“Hey, there’s always hope,” Dave said.
“That is not your people’s view,” Brenner said. “Perhaps you do not agree with them?”
“What, Jewish people? How’s—?”
“Dwarves.”
I winced. But then, I’d called him a dwarf before, so I knew what Brenner was in for. Dave made a face like he’d licked a battery.
“What, like how your grave has to be on granite? Like slate is bad luck? Like you gotta braid copper into your beard with your left hand, but if you do it with your right hand, you gotta eat a peck of coal to wash away the shame?” he expostulated. “Listen to this guy! Who can even keep track of what the dirt diggers believe, back in the Old Country? That’s how come my opa came over to Brooklyn, to get away from all that!”
“But you are ‘back in the Old Country’ now,” Brenner pointed out. “You do not share your kinsmen’s views?”
“Hey, buddy, look at the patch,” Dave said, jabbing his shoulder at him. “I’m an American, got that? Hundred percent. I don’t dig, I don’t sniff, I don’t go barefoot in the rain. Okay, I got the build and the beard, yeah, but that’s all. Everything else is just…”
He shook his head, seeking the right words.
“…ancient history,” he decided. That seemed to say it.
“You do not like the old things, then?” Brenner said, nodding slightly.
Dave smiled tightly. “You could sum it up that way, yeah.”
Brenner smiled back and resumed sharpening his stake. “Good. For I do not like the old things either.”
* * *
We got ready to go with plenty of prayer, like always. Because you might as well.
I’m Elvish Catholic, same as everyone else from the old neighborhood. Our churches are nice. Traditional. Lots of wood.
Our priests are human, of course, because the Church is pretty much a human institution. Maybe someday they’ll ordain an elf, but it’s not like the Man came down to save the elves, now is it?
Myself, I like to think that He did. But you can search the Bible up and down; the word “elf” ain’t in it. Matter of fact, the only pointy-eared immortals in Holy Writ aren’t the churchgoing kind.
We’d already had a Mass said for our safe passage, which took in more of the guys than you’d expect, most of ‘em being Protestant and all. Deacon Stadden led the other Prods in a long, long prayer for the same thing, with a couple of well-chosen songs to complement the mood, which certainly made me feel better.
And the big guy with the Torah on his collar did something with Dave’s people that we weren’t allowed to see. Despite all our efforts, Dave wouldn’t tell us what they did, and we couldn’t find out. Which is sad for a bunch of Recon experts, right?
Anyway, we were as prepped as could be in the spiritual department. Lots of guys carried crosses; you never knew when you’d run into a Strudel officer. Brenner said they used to all be Catholics, but I think he was just pulling my leg.
Dave claimed the Star of David he wore was even better than a cross. He had it sewn on his breast pocket, with another one on an armband. Brenner thought that was funny, but we never found out why.
And then it was my turn.
A platoon is commanded by a lieutenant. Look, it says so right there in the manual. And a company, such as us, is supposed to be commanded by a captain. But officers are scarce these days, for a number of reasons.
West Point takes four years to make a second lieutenant out of a civilian kid. OCS, Officer Candidate School, takes a soldier, usually a sergeant, and turns him into an officer in six months.
So far, so good. But the Point only graduates 400 second looies a year, even now that we’re in the biggest war ever. OCS can take more, but there’s not an endless supply of sergeants who can be trusted with forty men’s lives, either.
There are, however, a whole lot of colleges in the U.S. besides West Point. Their ROTC produces lots of lieutenants. Some of ‘em are born to it, and most of ‘em can manage.
Thing is, the enemy, here and in the Pacific, burns through lieutenants like firecrackers. There are never enough to go round.
Enter the Ninety-Day Wonders: college graduates who’d like to be officers and have been to three months of glorified boot camp. A gold bar goes on each shoulder and forty guys live or die on his guesses. And his character, of course.
Maybe that should be the other way around.
You’re supposed to pronounce it “Lyoo-tenant,” or as our Southern brethren prefer, “Lee-oo-tennat.” I’m from Noo Yawk, so not only can’t I say it, I can’t even hear it. I say “Loo-tenant” and mean it sincerely, never mind the looks I get.
My old man says that in the old days, back before he came over in ‘78 with Lafayette, the King was appointed by God. That meant the officers appointed by the King were in God’s chain of command. They didn’t have chaplains back then, so the Colonel, or the Captain, was also the Sky Pilot in Chief of his command. He had to be ready with a sermon whenever it came up.
Well, I’m not an officer. But I was all the King had right now. I called the men together.
“Y’all better listen up, y’heah?” I shouted.
I’m from New York, but that doesn’t matter. Every sergeant in the Army sounds, or at least yells, like a Confederate veteran.
“Take off yer helmets,” I barked. “Now this heah, underneath of your helmet, is your Brain Housing Group. Nomenclature: hair…scalp…skull…brain. Your dual optical sensing system and ow-ditory sensing system are attached to the Brain Housing Group. Your Chow Hole is located below, and forward of, your Brain Housing Group.”
Make that an angry Confederate veteran. You want to keep combat men’s attention, you have to give it some emphasis. “Maintenance: keep your Brain Housing Group clean! When possible, keep it dry. Remove all but one inch of hair as often as necessary. This task can be performed by nonspecialists!”
It was all an act, at first—the yelling, the not-quite-cussing, the sarcasm, the insults—sergeantry in general. I copied the sergeants who’d trained me, back before I became one.
“Disassembly: do not attempt to disassemble your Brain Housing Group! Nothing serviceable by non-specialists is contained inside!”
But then about two years into the Army (and only a couple of months into combat) I figured out what was eating me. This was right after a dogface with a very old M1 Garand fired off five shots with one pull of the trigger. Seems the sear was so worn down it didn’t catch properly, turning the M1 into an automatic weapon. Pretty soon lots of the doggies were filing their sears down on purpose, so as to have their very own automatic Garands.
A couple of them wound up with jammed rifles. Which was better than the optimist who didn’t reassemble his action properly, and got the bolt carrier group back in his face.
That’s when I realized the simple truth: the doggie was the enemy. His laziness, his sloppiness, and his aimlessness were the only things that kept him from killing us all through sheer stupid overconfidence. If he straightened a grenade ring with his teeth, and thereby ruined said teeth and made him unfit for service until they were repaired, at least that was one grenade he didn’t drop at his feet, or throw full-armed into a tree ten feet away so it bounced back behind himself, or carry on his belt by the by-our-lady safety ring so it fell off after a thousand up-and-down bounces on the move. Joe Dogface was going to kill us all.
Now my sergeantry isn’t an act any more. I don’t want the guys to die, but they don’t make it any easier sometimes.
“Inside your brain is your Soul Retaining Clasp, one each. Its exact workings are classified. If you fail to keep your Brain Housing Group in good repair, like for example by not wearing a helmet, it may become damaged, and your soul will escape. That can be good, or it can be bad. The Army answer is that it is Bad.”
A hand went up. Of course.
“Yeah, you in the back,” I said. I knew his face, but not his name. “Sergeant, what if we go to Heaven? That’s good, ain’t it?”
I scowled. But now I remembered the earnest smartass’ name. “Sure, Trasky. Sure. You get to spend Eternity in the Heavenly Fields with Almighty God and his legion of angels. While meanwhile, down here on Earth, your country, your family, your buddies are suffering under the iron rule of Satan, because we lost the War! Still sound like a good idea to you?”
“But Satan’s already the prince of this world, Sarge.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t want him becoming King, too.”
And sure, we took care of the physical. Ammo and more ammo. Two canteens, in case we were out of supply a few days—you don’t want to drink that dead-zone water. All weapons oiled and cleaned, test-fired, and a couple replaced that we just couldn’t keep going any more.
We couldn’t get any new Thompsons—everybody loves ‘em—so I gave mine to Heuchert and got a brand-new carbine in its place. Still smelled like Cosmoline in places. It was light, handy, packed a lot of rounds, and shot fast and pretty true out to 200 yards. In fact, it was the perfect little weapon, unless you had to either use it as a club or put someone down with the first shot. Then it wasn’t so great.
Like Dave said, the carbine was a handy thing to have if you couldn’t carry a gun. But supposedly, the job of a leader is to lead, not shoot. Heuchert needed the Tommy gun more than I did. He was a wide, solid, cheerful soldier from Pennsylvania, the part described as “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabama in the middle.” He was massively strong and built like a miner, although he actually drove a milk truck before the war. He was always ready to share an opinion about the American League, even in the off season, and played cards with enthusiasm; he was a good sport about losing, which happened often. He was thinking of becoming a sportswriter after the war.
He was aggressive enough that I didn’t figure the gun would go to waste.
Feet had been a problem until Dave got an idea. Shoe-pacs are great at keeping out the wet, but the synthetic rubber sole squeaks and the canvas uppers flop, because one size doesn’t fit all. Bad for stealth.
So we invented a couple of six-foot-six Swedes with trench foot. I don’t mean we actually invented them; we’ll abide by the Ingolstadt Convention as long as the Enemy does. But we did put them on the morning report with all the actual guys. Pretty soon, the Medical Corps sent us boxes and boxes of super-size socks. Put ‘em on over the shoe-pac and you could walk on gravel or mud or anything short of jingle-bells without a sound.
When Larsen came down with trench foot, I hoped we hadn’t jinxed him. But he was only six-two, so maybe it was a coincidence.
* * *
King went up the mountains without complaint. Not out loud, anyhow. We drove to Dieffelsbach and a little past, then dismounted. The other side of the mountain was between the lines, our natural habitat. But a jeep moving around up there made smoke and noise, too much for our St. Hubert’s medals to mask. A jeep can’t use a Miraculous Medallion unless it accepts Christ, and so far, Detroit’s been turning out a load of pagans.
“Atheists,” said Dave. “Cars are atheists. Without thought, they can’t have gods, right?”
He couldn’t read minds. I just had a habit of thinking out loud.
And anyway, “They stop at the darndest times. They get spooked by gremlins and won’t move. Brand new parts rust away overnight. I call that paganism, or rank superstition. They ain’t got no faith,” I said.
In some outfits, the fact that I wear five stripes, and Dave had two, would have ended the debate right there. But Recon puts a premium on brains, not deference. When I was a corporal, that seemed like a better idea than it did now.
Night’s the best time to operate against humans. We can’t see, we get scared, and there’s a chemical reaction in the brain that tells us “it’s dark: go to sleep, stupid.” Blind, sleepy, and skittish. A line completely covered by machine guns in daytime is full of holes in the dark.
It is, however, the absolute worst time to operate against vampires. The Strudels don’t have a lot of the bloodsuckers, but there’s at least one in every company. Just about all their officers are undead, although sometimes they have to use warm officers as lieutenants and such. You hear about special squads or platoons with no men at all, just vampires. Far as I know, that’s all talk.
Brenner smiled wryly, as though mocking my trouble with the men. My glare said I’d like to see him do better.
“Always we struggle to point ourselves in the same direction,” he said instead. “The Strudel has perfected the art of obedience. True, this is no credit to his character, since he achieves it by magic, but still. The effect is the same.”
“The great Moltke divided officers into clever and stupid, energetic and lazy. With us, we may hope a stupid officer has clever sergeants, or a lazy sergeant a few energetic privates. Often it is so. Of course, we also get the bright captain with foolish lieutenants, or the energetic sergeant strapped with a lazy squadron. I imagine you have some ideas of how to rectify that latter situation, not so?”
I suppose I knew the Krauts had to practice sergeantry, too, but it was still strange to hear it out loud.
“But with them, you see, a stupid leader makes all his men stupid. They are but obedient extensions of his will, including all his faults. And also, a clever leader over there makes all his men as if they were clever. In the nature of things, there are more stupid than clever leaders, of course, man being a swinish species with but few bright spots.”
I could have disagreed with him, but I let him go on. It was a trick I’d picked up listening to Dave, of saying ‘Pray continue’ with my eyes alone.
“Ah, but when one of the diamonds in the mud does happen to surface, why, it is as if they have a company of geniuses. Can you imagine it? Even our elite forces, so-called, are collections of flawed individuals, all pulling in different directions. We are like a sled with horses pulling left, right, even backward, all the time. Making the horses stronger does nothing to focus our motion forward, you see? On those rare occasions when a team of prodigies pulls all in the same direction, ach! They can break armies, even change the course of history. Leonidas’ Three Hundred, Alexander’s companions, even Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, as I readily admit. It is a thing of beauty.
“For us, all must be in perfect alignment for this sort of over-unit to be born. No, it is not the right word…super-unit, perhaps. As in your cartoon books. Rare, vanishingly rare, is a super-unit among ourselves.
“But for them…all it takes is one bright leader,” he said, summing up with a flourish of his stake. “Which is why we must keep them from developing any more.”
He stabbed the stake into the ground. I’d been formulating a wisecrack to let the air out of his speech, but I forgot it when the stake bit dirt. That part, I agreed with all the way.
We broke off twigs for our helmet covers. Brenner had a cloth sack for his helmet instead of a mesh of cord like we used. He used his knife to cut slits in it, then ran the branches through the slits. I asked him why the cloth cover, and he turned back one corner. It was white on the inside.
“For snow,” he said. “Half the year is winter, not so?”
Yeah. Just because the Krauts had been fighting old Franz the Austro for five years before America got interested, that was supposed to mean they knew it all. They did, in fact, know just about every trick about modern warfare. But they didn’t have to have the know-it-all attitude to go along with it.
I’d heard some Germans didn’t act like they knew it all. Back when the war started, there had been a lot more of that sort.
I unlimbered a wisecrack, something about New York winter camouflage being a slushy gray. Before I could let it go, though, the ground slid sideways under my boots.
The bang came an instant later.
Everybody froze but me. I was moving toward the sound of the explosion.
Line troops are supposed to scatter when they’re under artillery fire, seeking the nearest cover. But at night in the woods, movement attracts the eye. Recon troops are supposed to freeze until they locate the source of the threat.
Not that everyone who wears the Eye on his collar actually does what he’s supposed to do. I passed a couple of guys who were huddled in a puddle behind a fallen tree, their heads jerking every which way in terror. One of them, I was pretty sure, was Szymkovic. I loomed out of the black across their line of sight and headed on—there wasn’t time to deal with them now. At least they didn’t shoot me, thinking I was Franz, or some black monster leaping through the darkness.
Well, I wasn’t Franz, anyway.
In a little pine-filled swale, the branches were full of trapped smoke. I grabbed at the skinny trees, skidded to a stop.
Corporal Spencer was down at the bottom, minus most of his leg. His buddy, McNeill, was lying on his stomach at the lip, right where the ground started to slope down. He was about thirty yards from Spencer.
“Mines!” McNeill hissed.
My training kicked in and suppressed my urge to swear. Some of the cleanest mouths you’ll find come out of beast barracks.
I saw it all plain as print. Spencer was laboring up the rise, hitting rocks and scared to make noise. A streambed with pines would absorb the noise, feel soft underfoot, and get his head under cover for a little ways. It was the obvious choice.
So obvious, in fact, that the Austros thought of it too. “Follow me,” I told McNeill. “Walk in my footprints.”
“What if it’s a Bouncing Betty?” he whispered. Those were nasty little devices which popped up about three feet in the air before they exploded, throwing shrapnel at about waist height, or a little lower. Guys were rightly terrified of them.
It was odd, though, for McNeill to be more worried about his privates than his corporal. I’d learned one more thing about one of my men tonight.
“Then you’ll have armor, woncha?” I said, and poked a thumb at my chest.
I added “C’mon,” which I wouldn’t have done a minute ago. I had pegged McNeill as one of the steady ones.
I took big steps, holding onto the pines for balance. Sap made sticky patterns on my hands. My boots crackled the dry needles just a little, but they were so quiet even McNeill, three yards back, probably didn’t hear ‘em.
Three yards, heck—he hadn’t taken more than one step down into the swale.
“Keep up,” I growled, “or you’ll forget where I stepped! There’s no mud to make footprints down here.”
“I can see ‘em,” he responded. “You brought your own mud with you.”
Even in the midnight blur, he was right. My boot prints were outlined with dark mud from further down the mountain.
“Close up anyway,” I said, and the tone was a threat. Are we going to have to do it this way?
He closed up. He didn’t grumble, but he didn’t grovel, either. His honor was preserved. So do men, if they are to stay men, go to war at each other’s side.
It’s still better than trying to make us into robots. That was the other side’s business.
Spencer was a medic before joining Recon. He had his bandages out, twisted around his upper leg, but he hadn’t tightened the windlass to make a proper tourniquet. He had his rosary in his hands, and he was whispering.
His hands and face shone like the full moon when I got there.
He’d lost too much blood.
I turned the windlass (a dowel included in the first-aid pack for just this reason) and tightened the bandage around his upper thigh, compressing his artery against his thighbone. I didn’t see that it made a lot of difference.
McNeill was there, and slit Spencer’s pant leg away so we could see what we were doing.
I pulled my compass out from inside my shirt and opened the cover, so the Saint Elmo backing would light up Spencer’s wound. Down here in the trees, it didn’t risk the mission, just us.
“He’s cold,” said McNeill, holding Spencer’s arm. “Spence? You there, buddy?”
Spencer was trying to talk. There was nothing wrong with his throat or chest, but he couldn’t force the words up. He was weakening fast.
“Spencer,” I said, taking hold of his hand. The tourniquet loosened, but we were beyond that now.
“Spencer, listen to me. I’m not gonna let you die. You hear?” He nodded, then gagged, like he’d swallowed something huge.
“You gotta help me,” I said. “When you feel it coming, fight back, you hear me? Cuss, yell, spit, anything, just don’t go to sleep,” I said.
McNeill got out a rosary. He got up on his knees.
“McNeill, take two steps back,” I said sharply and clearly. It was the loudest thing we’d heard since the mine went off.
He obeyed automatically, his legs moving even while his face reproached me. Weren’t we going to give Spencer a proper sendoff?
As it happened, no. We weren’t.
Spencer pulled sharply on my hand. I almost lost him then. He let out a long, long breath and groaned. I slapped him.
“Fight, Spence! Fight! Eyes on me!” I barked.
Then he shuddered, and he was dying. He was trying as hard as anyone could ask, but there just wasn’t enough blood left in his body. The End was coming.
Now.
I got one foot under myself and heaved. I grabbed my wrist with my other hand, putting my back, my leg, both arms, even my neck into hauling Spencer back from the Pit.
It felt like he dropped about three feet. His whole weight was on my hand. There was a shocking lot of it, too—how’d he racked up so much guilt so young? Kids these days—but he was helping, pushing, along with me. He wasn’t making a lot of difference, because it was his first time dying. He didn’t know what to do.
But me, I’d been around some.
I hauled for all I was worth. I leaned back, getting my weight into it. Yes, I cheated some—my other knee was in his armpit, acting like a pivot to lever him up out of the ground.
From the waist down, he was deep into the Pit. There was still dirt there, under the pine needles, but he was past all that now. Things brushed at his leg—legs!—knocking him this way and that.
He got his other hand up and grabbed hold of mine. He pulled. He was stronger than me—if we’d have been arm-wrestling, I’d have lost. But we were both on the same side tonight.
I dragged him up to his knees and stood up leaning backwards. If I fell now, he might drop right over the Edge. But his weight, and his strength, anchored me. I took a grinding step back, pulling up, and his legs slid up out of the ground, into view. One of them was solid mud and dirt down to his torn combat boot. The other was pink and new and utterly hairless, like the leg of a twenty-two-year-old newborn.
Something tugged at his heel one last time and retreated, beaten.
I panted, with exertion and relief. Spencer came to his senses with a visible click. He grinned.
“Thanks, Sarge,” he said slowly, finding his voice. “Guess I shouldn’ta tried that shortcut, huh?”
“Well, you’ll remember it next time,” I said, too glad to remember my sergeant’s growl. I grinned at McNeill, too, who hadn’t seen it before. He was shocked.
Spencer nodded sideways at me, looking at his buddy.
“The Sarge’s pop was Elvish, straight off the boat,” he explained. “You know how they can’t die? Well, he got some of that from his old man.”
“They can die,” I said, shaking a little with reaction. “They just don’t get old. And when they do die, they don’t go to Heaven or the other place. Don’t go much of anywhere. They’re air spirits, right? No air up there.”
“How ‘bout you, Sarge? Can you die?” said Spencer, laughing. “Hate to lose you, after all this.”
“Sure I can,” I said. I put a little rasp in it, because Spencer was getting chummy. Much as every decent instinct demands that men get a little weepy when someone’s been pulled back from the brink of death, the Army frowns on it. Can get outta hand.
“Sure I can die,” I said again. “I just get better, is all.”
I let go of his hand, but my arm didn’t drop. Our rosaries were entangled. I had to admit, that was kinda funny.
* * * * *
My old man’s Elvish—came over with Lafayette. Now, everybody knows Elves’re immortal, and I guess I got that from him. They don’t get sick, they can’t starve or drown, and it takes a lot of wounds to kill one. They heal fast, even grow an arm or a leg back eventually. But when they die, that’s it. They’re gone. No Hell, no Heaven, just fft! Like blowing out a match.
Me, I’m only half-Elvish. Like the old man, I can die. But instead of staying dead, I get better.
The first time it happened, I was six, and everybody had diphtheria. Ma wanted to get me some medicine, but the old man said it was a waste of money. Either I was gonna beat it or it was gonna beat me. I guess that’s how folks looked at it back where he’d come from, but it ain’t a very modern attitude. Ma was lace-curtain Irish, first-generation born in the States, but even her people were more modern than that.
Anyway, the medicine came too late, and I died.
I don’t remember choking. That’s what kills you, choking when your throat swells shut. It musta happened to me, but I don’t remember it. Coughing, yeah, that I remember. Lotsa coughing. One right after another. I’d start a cough before one was finished and end up hiccupping. It was kinda funny.
I wasn’t scared. They didn’t tell me it could kill me.
So I wake up, and whaddya know, I ain’t coughing no more. I thought Ma had made it better, with her soups and tea and all. I didn’t know about the medicine—she told me later, when I was grown up and the old man had left.
Turned out, I didn’t need it. Woke up the next morning right as rain. And lemme tell you, I was some kinda immune to diphtheria after that! A drop of my blood would immunize you completely. Which was good, because this was the Teens and we didn’t have no vaccine like they do now. They immunized my whole class, three-hundred-and-some fourth graders, a few drops at a time. Even helped Rich McCoy get outta his iron lung, although he didn’t come back to school for another year.
Yep, I got death beat. Since then I’ve died a slew of times—just the once before the War, of course. I guess I musta been hit seven times over here—I got a special gold star on my Purple Heart when I got it for the eleventh time. Except for some Troll in the Pacific, that’s an all-time record.
Anyone else gets three Hearts, they send him the heck home. So I guess there’s a price for everything.
* * *
Franz the Strudel had heard the mine explode, of course. But mines exploded fairly often on the Line. He couldn’t know for sure we were coming in force. Did he have a reserve handy? Was he willing to send it out after one mine, when something else might be coming in a little more carefully somewhere else? Unless both answers were yes, we still had a chance.
Maybe it’s mirror-imaging, but I figured if I were the Strudels, I’d send a recon patrol to see what’s what. Not that mirror-imaging is something vampires are very good at.
Brenner emerged from the background a few steps away. The spatter-colored smock he wore made him blend into the woods better than our foliage-studded camo nets did, and he knew how to move silently. You pick it up after a month or so in the woods; heck, I’m from Woodlawn in the Bronx, and even I got to sliding like a shadow over the snow, eventually.
Dave was crunching determinedly through the snow, because where I balanced on the crust, he crashed right through. It was up to his waist and had to be hard slogging, but he didn’t complain. His face was cycling through some pretty vile exclamations, but he didn’t make a sound. We could always hope that any mind-reader searching for us might be struck blind with disgust or admiration for his vocabulary.
Moving a platoon quietly is basically impossible. Someone’s always gonna sneeze, snap a branch, or crunch snow under his clodhoppers.
What, you’re waiting for the but? There isn’t one. Moving a platoon quietly is nearly impossible.
With enough prep, though, we might not be loud enough to get intercepted. Selection’s important when you have time; most of King Company were picked men, although sometimes we got handed replacements and told to make do. That tended to even itself out, because the ones with a natural gift for sneakery prospered, and the others got wounded.
Once you got selected, you need training. In some ways, the Army’s all about training. It never stops, or it shouldn’t. A guy had to practically out-sneak the Shadow before we’d let him go on leave. Again, sometimes an officer had other ideas and sent a man away whose skills were gonna rot before he got back. When he did, he’d put us all in danger until he got back in the groove.
But you have to have officers in an Army, don’t you? Well, don’t you?
I was chewing on that when a tree wobbled in my line of vision.
And crackled noisily.
* * *
All of this is not, or not just, a soldier’s ancient right to complain. But I think you may have an idea of how continuously noisy we were on that twig-choked slope and how loud the thrashing to our front had to be in order to be audible over our own sounds.
The Austros had controlled this area on paper for years, but they hadn’t done much with it. When your legions are breaking down the doors in Paris and Berlin, you don’t need to guard the Alps. But now, of course, having picked a fight with the whole world, the Austros were having to station some units up here in the valleys, in case we tried coming through.
Which we were, actually, in a few days. Hence King Company’s presence up here.
And therefore, with their army being largely based on the power of curses which break the laws of life and death, everything was starting to die. It wasn’t as bad as Waldorfsbruck, to which we’d be returning if all went well; but the leaves were turning, the grass was brown, and branches were drying out from the tips, which was where their metabolism went wrong to begin with.
Thus, when you brushed against a tree, armloads of twigs snapped off. Even if you were careful, the wind had still been there ahead of you, scattering the ground with crunchy, gray-brown gravel. It had an unpleasant resemblance to a well-tindered campfire just before you lit it up.
Fortunately, Franz hadn’t come up with that particular bright idea. Yet.
This guy was not only splintering the terrain with every footstep, like the rest of us were trying not to do. He was also snapping down branches from trees as he pushed between them, and making intermittent straining, stretching noises as he pushed a tree right over instead of going around. Which we’ve all done on occasion.
But this fellow was making it a policy. Tall trees, twenty feet and more, although barely as thick as your wrist, were coming down, plowing through their dried-out neighbors. You could track his motion quite literally a mile away, by sound if not by sight.
When a guy’s coming right at you, there aren’t a lot of choices. But when he’s coming so slow, there’s time to prepare a proper reception.
I made signs which resembled those taught in Ranger school; we’d worked out some of our own, too, under the pressure of time and urgency. The guys scattered, fanning out like the fingers of a spread hand, and went down to a crouch, but no further. In deadfall woods like this, you couldn’t see anything prone.
Where are my BARs? I asked myself for the thousandth time. The stubby guys who carried them were easy to pick out by eye; we had one on each flank, at ten and two o’clock, and Dave off to my right a bit. Unless this guy thrashing the woods was just bait for an attack from behind (and didn’t I just love to have THAT idea to chew on), any surprise guests were in for a twenty-round magazine of thirty-cal, served hot, in a few seconds with minimal warning.
A tree not twenty yards ahead of me waggled violently, showering the vicinity with debris. Leaves formed a red-orange smokescreen for a few seconds. But the tree didn’t fall; it was some bit thicker than the others, a bit too thick to just push out of the way, apparently.
Then there came a crunching woody thunk, and it started to shudder. It whipped back and forth several times a second, tight at the base, thrashing in counter-rotating heaves higher up. What leaves it hadn’t lost scattered in all directions, like light rain.
This was something new, and I’d never been able to resist those. Besides, I told myself as I started forward, bent almost double in my combat crouch, if it was new, our usual responses might not be enough. The more time we had to come up with something to trump this new pain in the neck, the better.
Once I was uphill a handswidth of the shuddering tree, I eased myself down into the push-up position and glided forward from my knees. I’d raise my torso up when I was close enough.
Thrash thrash thrash, pitter patter snap. All that was the tree, not me.
A log no thicker than my head lay across my path. I had my helmet to cover my white hair, ludicrously visible at night, but the round shape is dead obvious against any kind of natural background. I cocked my head to the right and gave it some push-up, raising one eye over the chipped bark of the log.
White sure was visible at night, even under partial canopy cover. The girl at the base of the tree wore a plain white dress, frayed into strings at the edges, and leaped out into my field of vision like a bomb-blast.
She was blond, barefoot, her legs and arms marked up with dirty scratches, and she was biting the tree, worrying it back and forth like a dog with his teeth sunk in a bone. I heard splintering.
When the wood started to crack, she whined. It was familiar, in that a woman could indeed make such a sound if she wanted to, but also horribly alien, because no woman should ever want to make that noise. She sounded like she was imitating a desperate dog trying to feed a bottomless hunger, and doing as expert a job of making that noise as a human mouth could do.
K-k-crack! A long chunk of wood snapped off. She threw her head to the side, spitting out splintered bits, and threw her jaws back into the wound left in the tree.
Now she was really whining up a storm; the tree apparently wasn’t supplying what she so desperately needed. I squinted, as if seeing better would make it make better sense. Someone to my right, maybe Dave, uttered a low exhalation of amazement.
Her head snapped up.
The teeth were long, canine, carnivorous. As expected. And clean, shining white, despite having been axed into hard wood not seconds ago.
But they were also utterly dry, in a mouth as pale as newly fallen snow.
She hissed, sort of, like she was trying to growl like a wolf but couldn’t hit the lower registers. Then she pounced.
Of course, she was still leaning up against the tree, so it held her back. The whole trunk shifted, though, from the force of her lunge. A big crooked branch cracked loose, skittering down through layers until it fell right across Dave, making him duck.
The dead girl thrashed a couple more times, working the tree off her shoulder with each lunge, until she slipped past and fell scramblingly on her face. She was up instantly, running with her hands grabbing protrusions from the ground to keep her balance. No, that wasn’t it—she grabbed the ground to pull herself along, to run faster.
The branch had distracted Dave. He still horsed the BAR around to the left, to bear on the girl, but swinging twenty pounds can’t be done immediately, no matter how strong you are. Unless she fell flat out, breaking her momentum, he wasn’t going to make it.
K-pow! K-pow! went several rifles at once. The .30-06 is a hell of a man stopper, which is why just about every army uses some variation of it as their rifle cartridge. But this close, they just dotted her nightgown without stopping her charge. Vampires don’t bleed, and they don’t suffer hydrostatic shock, even when they’re crazier than any Un-dead I’d ever seen before. Our rounds were probably punching right through; the heart is a mighty small target, and even then, we weren’t packing wooden bullets.
Then someone must have hit a bone, because she spun to a halt, flipping around her shoulder. She flailed at the air, getting one leg under her.
We shot her more. A lot more.
Eventually, she stopped trying to get up. She was still moving, but small motions, no more than twitches. I called “cease fire” over and over, until one by one the guys did, indeed, cease fire.
Silence fell like a thunderclap.
“Murph,” Dave said into the stillness, “I think maybe we oughta box around this particular hollow. Because the thing is…”
I had a feeling I knew what he was going to say. It’s a feeling I’m very familiar with. But I never got to find out, because on the heels of our gunfire, the woods erupted with howling hisses. Left, right, straight ahead—everywhere but behind.
And suddenly there were a lot of light colors, moving through the woods towards us.
* * *
Throughout military history, the hardest thing has been to motivate men to run into danger where death is right in front of their eyes. Believe it or not, vampires want to live, too, even though they already lost that race when they became Un-dead. Plus, they’re risking not just threescore and ten, but eternity, when they put their cold hides on the line. The Enemy had just as much trouble getting his men, or former men, to fight as we did.
Patriotism wasn’t the answer for their side. And neither was self-defense; being kind of primitive, socially, the vampire wasn’t moved by the argument that we had to fight ‘em over there so they won’t come over here and attack us at home. For all their lying in their native earth and so forth, they didn’t seem psychologically attached to any particular place. A torch-bearing mob overruns Castle Bloodula? Well, then they just move a hundred miles and wait a hundred years, until everyone who remembers the uprising is dead. It’s a strategy of patience that their leaders have to overcome when they want to take vampire armies to war.
Threats would probably work, I guess. Armies have been driven that way since forever. What you can threaten a guy with when he’s literally trapped in a dead body which will burn at the touch of the Sun, I don’t know. But a lot of the Un-dead seem paralyzed with fear a lot of the time; clearly there are things they do fear, and those things could be threatened by those in power.
But they didn’t have enough vampires to keep each and every one under the eye of a loyal officer around the clock; inevitably, there were going to be times when their troops were on their own, bound by nothing outside their own heads. Nor could they realistically increase their numbers so that they could supervise all their troops; each vampire needs to feed every other night at least, but a man can’t survive being bitten more than about once a month. So each vamp needs fifteen or so human cattle, minimum, and a lot more than that if he expects his humans to do anything more athletic than shuffle slowly from place to place.
If fear isn’t strong enough for all of them, and loyalty doesn’t cut the ice either, what else can you use? It’s not like the Allied armies have them in a state of abject terror, although the last couple of years of the War darn well should have the Un-dead quaking in their floppy-topped pirate boots.
If you want to make a man a sergeant in a modern army, he has to be able to change plans on the fly. As recently as the First War, sergeants were basically voice extenders for their officers. The captain yells, “Move out!” and ten sergeants yell “Move out!” even louder. Then each one makes sure the ten or twelve guys under his command do, in fact, move out. Ten guys is few enough that the old-timey sergeant can personally kick each butt if he has to, although generally after the second kick the other butts get their butts moving on their own accord.
Sure, we still do that. But around the middle of the First War, I guess about the time Verdun and the Somme were winding down, the Germans started looking at the math and figuring they weren’t going to win the way things were going. They’d tried substituting artillery for manpower, but at Verdun, that wound up trading lives for lives, because the French had gunnery too. In order to win, they had to attack, but once the attackers left the trenches, they wasted most of their strength attacking places that weren’t defended, while the rest of their army broke its teeth on the places that were defended.
Enter Hutier and Bruchmuller and the concept of “infiltration tactics.” It sounds like simplicity itself: instead of wasting men assaulting strongpoints that weren’t going to fall, send the men around them, into the spaces in between which weren’t held very strongly at all. The enemy can’t be strong everywhere; find the weak spots and get through them. Drive for the enemy rear, tearing up telephone wires, supply dumps, rear headquarters, and all the machinery that makes the guys at the front able to fight. A few hours or days later, those invincible strongpoints are going to be out of ammo, food, drinking water and medical supplies. But even before that happens, those men in the strongpoints are going to feel abandoned, cut off in suddenly-enemy territory, and their morale is going to collapse like soggy cardboard.
Now, this requires every sergeant to have the brains of an officer. He has to not just repeat his captain’s orders, and force the men to obey them, but to identify strongpoints and weak spots, choose among the several axes of advance open to him, decide when to move and when to halt, and choose targets in the rear to attack. Even captains in Napoleon’s army didn’t have half that much to do, as long as their hundred men showed up at the time and place the General told them to.
Can every sergeant be brought to this high level of military excellence? Ask the Russians, French and British from 1917. Yes, they can. Yes, they did. If it weren’t for two million Yanks too crazy brave to stay in their trenches (and, to be fair, the worst influenza outbreak in centuries), Germany would have won the war.
Afterward, every army in the world except one adopted the German model of sergeantry. Instead of a captain deciding the fate of a hundred men, each sergeant decided the fate of a dozen, subject to the orders from higher command. It helped keep the men focused and moving forward when industrial demonic war got unbearably intense.
The one army that didn’t? Austria-Hungary-Roumania. The Triple Monarchy decided that if fidelity to the Church and its Master wasn’t going to spare their ancient empire from destruction, they would damned well explore other alternatives. So, even though they made spectacular, bloodcurdling use of the powers of the Damned, their army was still very much a top-down do-it-or-else organization, with not enough whip-wielders to go around.
If all you want a soldier to do is rush the enemy and do some damage, before being destroyed, it turns out they’d found hunger an adequate motivator.
I’d been most surprised to find a girl in the woods alone, especially in light of what these woods had become since the front lines moved closer. What catastrophically bad luck had dumped her here, Un-dead and evidently starving, hungry enough to try and drink the blood of a tree, in the path of the Third Army’s coming push into the Alps?
It strained probability into a pretzel to assign her misfortune to bad luck, now. Because if that were the case, her fifty or so fellow villagers had chanced into luck just as bad.
Boys, men, fat oldsters and mustachioed amputees, little girls in their pinafores and hobbling cripples who should have been confined to bed—all of them were galloping out of the dark woods, fangs thirsting for our blood. They wore civilian clothes, mostly nightshirts and stockings, as though they’d been dragged out of their beds and turned into Un-dead monsters before they could dress. Most were barefooted, and the necklines of their gowns were mostly torn away, as though their attackers had gobbled even the blood that spilled onto their clothes when they did.
In hindsight, we probably should have run for it. It usually encourages the enemy, but I don’t see where they had a lot of room at the top of the motivation scale, anyway. But it’s also very bad for your own side’s morale to abandon a position, even if it’s an absolute deathtrap. You do it if you must, but it’s usually a mistake to make that decision hastily.
In any case, I did not make that decision in time. I’m only human, mostly.
We had the BARs positioned perfectly; the attack was on a broad front, but concentrating toward our center, where the rifle fire had given our position away. So all the flankers had to do was orient inward and they had the Austrians in a crossfire. No way they could hide behind the trees, because a tree which blocks bullets coming from your front doesn’t do much at all for bullets coming ninety degrees to your left. If they went prone, we’d have a hard time hitting them, but they couldn’t advance.
Even against front-line Austro troops, that was true, because 99 out of 100 of them are warm, breathing men. They won’t rush into fire which bypasses their cover, and the few that do will get hit and go down, reinforcing the majority’s conviction that they really shouldn’t be out in this firepower.
But every single one of these people was Un-dead, therefore immune to most bullets. And maddened by blood-thirst, therefore immune to fear of the True Death we would inflict if we won. It was the reverse of the Enemy’s perennial problem: if you can’t drive a vampire through fear, and you can’t use pain, what else, really, do you have?
One round in five made of Colorado silver, with heart shots and headshots when those weren’t available, was about all we had left.
Brenner cut loose with his machine-rifle, just about blasting a gangly youth in lederhosen and miner’s cap loose from all his limbs. The guy went down, flopping, and Brenner let him fall, setting his back foot to receive a charge from a pigtailed hausfrau in her nightshift. He took a long step to meet her, planting his wooden bayonet in the center of her chest. She stiffened and fell, snapping off the bayonet flush with the handle, while the kid in the lederhosen continued to throw his arms around like a jump rope held at only one end.
Dave was snapping off bursts from the BAR, pang-pang-pang, pang-pang-pang, walking each one into the center of mass of a stumbling, hissing shape in the darkness. Silver leaves blistered tracks in the Un-dead; they don’t heal like regular bullet holes. Each one he capped in this manner was out of the fight, although eventually they’d get back up as their blood routed around the wound tracks. Shooting a living man is like punching a hole in a Lister bag of water, but shooting a vampire is more like stabbing a hole into a half-moist sponge. There isn’t much result.
These guys, however, didn’t even leak the way a vampire should. They just sprang holes and kept coming, or fell down and got up again. I swear I saw dust puff from one of the hits a barefoot boy took to my half right. Didn’t they have any blood at all?
When you’ve shot your eight rounds from a Garand, the clip ejects with a loud ping, right through your field of vision on the sights. It’s hard to miss. When you’re out of bullets for your M1 carbine, the working parts go click as they try to push a round into the chamber, and don’t find anything there but smoke and oil.
I wasn’t used to the carbine yet; they’re supposed to be for officers, on the theory that it’s better to have a slimmed-down rifle than just a handgun. And as far as the theory goes, I agree.
And yes, I was checked out on the weapon. Shot Marksman, as a matter of fact.
But I hadn’t used it in combat yet, when there are a lot of other things occupying your mind, and your heart rate (already unhealthy by the standards of adult men who don’t have Elf blood) is hammering like a Singer sewing machine. So it took me a moment—several moments—to associate the repeated flat click with the carbine’s failure to spit fire out the other end.
Therefore, by the time I was grabbing another light, handy magazine off my bandolier, the buzzcut young Un-dead fellow in striped trousers and armless undershirt had slapped a sapling aside and grabbed hold of me by the elbow.
He was planning to drag me in and go for the bite right there on the arm, it looked like, but he only got one hand on my elbow before I twisted away. I take a lot of flak for looking like the photonegative of Bela Lugosi, but by God I was glad of my old man’s genes just then.
Instead of pulling against vampire strength, which was a bonehead play, I spun, then yanked my arm straight back out of his grasp, along the part from elbow to wrist where it narrows. He did manage to clamp a finger and thumb around my wrist, but before he could close them fully, I stuck out a leg and dropped; he was strong, sure, but he couldn’t hold my entire weight, backpack and belt gear and everything, with just one thumb.
So I was out, down on one knee within spitting distance of a vampire. Not an enviable place to be. There was noise on both sides, and not just the cracks of rifles, so I figured they’d broken through our base of fire. Well, it was hard to kill the Un-dead.
As soon as I solved my own little problem, I needed to see where the weak spots were in our line, and address them. I’d dropped my carbine getting loose of his hold, so I kicked him sideways in the side of the knee, dropping him. He flailed and raked my boot with iron fingernails; the sole tore, but held.
I had a sharpened stick in my belt, which was easier to get to from a semi-seated position than my .45. I snatched it up, got my left hand under me, and stabbed overhand downwards.
He raised his arm to block it and the stick speared straight into his flesh. He grinned, surprised that it didn’t hurt, I think. Then he swept his claws at my face.
But there was a sturdy stick in his arm, so when he tried to swipe at me, the stick held him back. His strength tore it out of my hand pretty quick, but even so, the stick’s point ripped up his forearm from its midpoint all the way up, and into, the hand.
He lay goggling at the arm he’d just destroyed, giving it a tentative shake. I slugged him in the face.
His head snapped back, a little, but he didn’t go down. You punch at the face because it’s loaded with fine nerves, in order to make all the expressions we do. Hurts much worse than a punch in the arm, say.
But without the sense of pain, a punch in the face isn’t much to worry about. He blinked, leaned forward, and fell on his face as the ruined arm failed to support him.
He was still getting used to the new state of affairs, and I didn’t want him to formulate a new plan involving only one working arm. But my fist wasn’t getting me anywhere. I needed something hard, to jar the Un-dead brain that was, after all, still in the driver’s seat, even without a heartbeat. My hand would break before his skull did.
I groped around for a rock, finding many brittle sticks, and my helmet flopped to one side, biting into my hairline.
It had done so many times a day since I got the wretched thing; my head was, according to the Army, an odd size. But for the first time, I was grateful.
I snatched it off my dome by the brim and slammed him in the back of the head, hard. The steel went clung, driving his face into the deadfall and dirt.
A few more thumps, and he lay semi-still, though the ruined arm’s talons were still flexing. I snatched up my pistol, struggled to pull back the slide (my fingers were going numb from gripping the helmet rim so hard) and shot him.
My second shot hit right at the base of the skull, and he stopped moving completely.
I fought to catch up with my breath. Like running down a hill, I had to keep going faster and faster just to catch up.
Flat snaps and grunts reminded me the fight wasn’t over just because I’d put one guy in the dirt.
Heuchert, to my left, was stabbing a matronly-looking vampire in the chest, trying and trying to hit the heart. His sleeves were a mass of rips and tears. Behind him, Spencer was reloading a BAR, while Szymkovic stood over him, sighting and firing his M1. He put three into one Austrian, shifted an inch, and popped off another. Apparently that one went down, because he didn’t fire again.
First squad was giving it all they’d got on the right, so far without letting any of the enemy through. Right where I was, however, it was hand to hand.
I shot an old geezer in the head from inches away, blowing him right off Don Leuders. He went down, too, clutching his arm, but I didn’t have time to check on him. Another shape reared out of the darkness, and I shot that, too. I didn’t have many bullets left by the time the silver round came up and threw him onto his back.
I stepped on a rifle, wiped the action mostly clean, and shot another vampire. This time the argent round was the first one up the spout, blowing half his head away. I’d been a lot luckier than the rifle’s previous owner, whoever he was. I hoped he’d just dropped it.
The other nice thing about a Garand rifle vs. a carbine is its weight and solidity, which makes it a vastly better bayonet platform. This one wasn’t so equipped, but I whipped out my own silvered blade and snapped it onto the lug. The next throatbiter who came after one of my men got a thrust in the chest and a buttplate across the brow, and dropped very convincingly.
There was still noise, but it was thrashing, splintering twigs, and gasping, rather than gunfire. We’d either lost or won; I saw khaki jackets moving around, and no white nightclothes still standing. We’d won.
* * * * *
Cleaning up after a fight, especially with the Un-dead, you have to check each enemy body to make sure. You even do so ahead of your own wounded, which sounds cruel, until you think how much worse off they’d be if some half-killed fanatic vampire killed you all the way before you could help them.
A machete is sort of a cross between an axe and a sword; you don’t stab with it, you chop. We’d been given a couple for bush breaking, but they weren’t standard issue like they were out in the Pacific. If you had one, you were on beheading detail once the shooting was over.
We still had a couple of ours, plus a more conventional axe for firewood. We got the battlefield cleaned up, or at least, secured.
Our own losses weren’t bad, considering we’d run into about thirty vampires with about thirty mortal men. First squad, Dave’s boys, hadn’t lost a man. Second squad lost Trasky and Rosetti, while Hickey from Third had a broken forearm and some missing teeth. Leuders, from headquarters squad, hadn’t had his head pulled off by the vamp I shot, but he was just this side of having a broken neck.
They could walk, so I sent them back with Jasman and Byrd as pathfinders. We got a little dirt over Trasky and Rosetti, then slipped up one side of the draw leading toward Hassberg. There wasn’t a town on the map, but this bunch had come from somewhere, and the maps didn’t show every house and hamlet. The stream which formed the draw was called the Habacht; further down, it widened into the Habacht valley, eventually leading to the finger lake Hassberg fronted on.
It was harder following the contour, instead of crossing the ridge and down the other side, but I didn’t want to take the easy way. There might be barefoot hunger-dogs down there, like the ones we’d run into.
There were far too many granite outcrops to make tracing a steady elevation easy, fun, or indeed, possible. We wound up coming down off the slope entirely too far for safety, until I had to call a halt.
Orienteering—land navigation—at night is more of an art than a science. My night vision is second to none, thanks to a certain mercenary immigrant, but even so, it was scratching at the outer edges of possibility to identify the peaks we were supposed to be seeing. But if due allowance were made for the nearly-full moon and the height of the trees further upslope, I was close to confident we were about where two grid lines crossed on the map.
Hassberg would be about six miles away, then, although with going south along the stream then east on the lakefront, it would work out to more like nine or ten. More if we wanted to be on the south side of the lake, which put a hundred yards of water between us and the town itself. You can see a lot from a hundred yards, and it’s pretty hard to chase you across open water, even if you have boats.
We put our sneakiest scouts out and held still; presently Lodge returned, putting his bearded face right up against my ear to whisper his report.
“A little town,” he said in a barely perceptible drawl. “Lots more civilians, like before. Vampires.”
“Any way around?” I replied in the same register.
“No. Steep on both sides. Only low ground’s along the river, goin’ east.”
But to get there, we’d have to go through the town, or learn to human-fly climb along sheer cliffs.
“Show me,” I decided, and we slithered off into the underbrush.
We reached the other two scouts, which was good, although Lodge would have told me if one of them didn’t come back. I filled Dave in, and we all moved forward quietly. Although Thomen of Third Squad would be the highest rank remaining if something happened to me, everybody knew Dave was my buddy. They’d look to him first. Thomen already knew he’d be second fiddle if Dave inherited the company; we’d discussed it, and he didn’t object. The facts on the ground meant it would be smoother in the short term for Dave to take it. Once they got back, of course, someone somewhere would make a decision for them.
And of course, if both Dave and I should fall, which was a darn sight more than just possible, Thomen would be in charge anyway.
There had been three large buildings amid a couple dozen houses in the village, whatever they called it. One had burned, but the walls were stone and still standing. From the arch of the windows, I figured it for a church.
The fire hadn’t happened too long ago; there were no soot streaks under the windows, like you get when it rains. And there wasn’t any growth along the foundation, although with the Enemy taking up residence, that wasn’t necessarily a sign.
The biggest structure was clearly a mill, although the water wheel would have been on the south side, where I couldn’t see it. Its roof was in pretty good repair.
And the third major building, the tallest now that the church was without its steeple, was painted in diagonal green and white stripes, which I’d seen in Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany. The map said this was, in fact, German territory, although if it wasn’t actually in Austria, it was probably indistinguishable from its cousins just the other side of the mountain, of which these ridges were aggressive foothills.
It was a three-story house with a green tile roof, surrounded by hundreds of civilians clawing, literally clawing, at the windows and walls. All the windows were broken, but there were barricades or something preventing them from climbing in. From an attic gable, a man in a checkered shirt leaned out, shifted a veil away from his face, and emptied a pitcher down the face of the wall. A vampire scrambling up the brickwork spat, shook his hand, and slipped off. Holy water, then, or some kind of slippery oil. The person at the window poured the last tailings of the pitcher onto the crowd below, driving them back for a moment.
She—not he—withdrew inside, closing the shutters. The veil she’d brushed out of her eyes had been long blond hair.
“It’s gotta be five or six hundred people out there,” Dave said. “Look, the ones on top are standing on the ones underneath.”
“The entire population, then,” said Brenner. “Count the houses—everyone and their outlying households, no doubt, are now Un-dead.”
“How?” I said, when what I really wondered was Why?
“Bites,” he replied flatly. “But as to why…they have no blood, you have observed this? Those who fought us in the woods, they were more of the same. They must have been drained of blood, then given just enough to raise them up again, but not enough to color their flesh or give their thoughts any facility above the animal base. These are not soldiers, Technical Sergeant, much less officers. These are but beasts. Hard to kill, ja. But beasts.”
“You seen this before?” I wanted to know. And didn’t.
“No. But it is a logical development.”
“How the Lady d’you figure that?” asked Dave testily, as though Brenner were approving of the idea rather than describing it. But the SS man didn’t rise to the bait.
“Every drop of blood available in this hamlet of let us say five hundred souls was taken,” Brenner replied calmly. “Was the point to gather vast amounts of blood for some project of the Damned? Perhaps. But perhaps also the point was not the blood, but the flesh that remained. To make a barrier of Un-dead brutes, maddened by thirst, to throw themselves on whoever entered their valley. Heavy weapons cannot come this way, at least not until we build a road, and foot soldiers, such as ourselves, would be torn to pieces if they ventured down there.”
If Franz was killing whole townships to put roadblocks in our way…
“They know we’re coming,” I groaned.
“Of a certainty, Technical Sergeant,” Brenner said agreeably. “How not? The Third Army is the most aggressive, this they know from our recent history. Topography permits only a few avenues of approach; this they cannot fail to know. Perhaps they do not know exactly where, or when, but it does not require supernatural insight to fortify the routes we might take. Lacking engineering assets, they have chosen to use their human capital as fortifications, and much more effectively than we the living can do.
“Although they are sometimes opaquely stupid, the Enemy often behaves as we would do, given their strengths and weaknesses. And this is what I would do.”
“What about the dame in the attic?” Dave said.
“This I would not do,” Brenner said. “I imagine she has not yet succumbed; perhaps the actual vampires who did the deed have withdrawn, leaving their mindless creations to finish the turning of the town. And she so far has remained above their grasp.”
“So far,” I said. “But she can’t have an unlimited supply of oil.”
“When she runs out…” said Dave, but he didn’t finish.
“It is even simpler than that,” Brenner said. “She must, of course, sleep eventually. But they do not. And their thirst will not let them falter.”
Yeah.
Saying I didn’t like it was like saying water was wet, or war was Hell.
“So, can we, like, get her out of there, somehow?” I was glad Dave brought it up first.
The big house was on the other side of the stream from us. Here in the village, the stream had brick banks, like a canal. The footbridge was inconveniently close to the house; the part of the blood-crazed crowd that couldn’t fit in the streets around the house was backed up on the bridge.
There was another bridge, a high wooden overwalk, next to the mill and connected to it. But the area around the mill was open; we’d never make it to the bridge without being seen, let alone cross over.
Or we could retrace our steps, cross the stream further north, and approach the town again from the other side.
“We could, of course, ensure she is not taken alive,” Brenner suggested.
He paused, but no one told him to go on.
“She is nothing to our mission,” he admitted, “but in general, better the men do not see us abandon a civilian female to her fate. A male, well, he is not of the same race as anyone but me, but women are considered often to be the same the world over. The men instinctively wish to protect her, to shield her from war’s unpleasant realities. They will brood, perhaps, over her fate if we leave her.”
“How ‘bout you, Brenner?” Dave demanded. “You gonna brood over her?”
“Oh, Corporal, I am already damned,” Brenner said. “I do not think this woman’s fate will make much, if any, difference.”
“So, therefore,” he continued, “I could do it. Put your soldiers’ resentment on me, a stranger, who will soon be gone. Rather than one of you.”
He eyed the building critically.
“I will have to get closer,” he said. “But at four hundred meters, it is not a heavy task.”
“No,” I said.
“I will save her body, perhaps her soul, from what they have planned…” he went on.
“No,” I said again, louder. He blinked—maybe he hadn’t heard me the first time. Or didn’t expect it.
“We’re not shooting the survivor,” I said, avoiding the words ‘she’ and ‘her’ altogether. “And I’m not hiding my authority behind some German. It’s my decision.”
“But naturally, my Sergeant.”
So she was going to hold out, but eventually be taken. And not just killed, but drained, turned into another of those white shrieking monsters. The beasts, as Brenner called them.
I could save her from that. But then I’d be a murderer.
Say all you like about “necessary” and “military;” she wasn’t the enemy, and she wasn’t barring the way to the enemy. I couldn’t justify killing her in order to win the war. And if it wouldn’t win the war, it was murder, pure and simple.
The mere fact that she’d be a lot better off if I did do it wasn’t part of the equation.
Yet it was still true: better a quick death, relatively painless, and eternity in the right place than pain, terror, death, and however many years of Un-death with all the guilt and horror they would contain. If it was me, I’d want someone to do it.
I wouldn’t pull the trigger with my own hand; I’m not a crack shot. But no matter who did it, it would be by my order, so it was on my head.
I’d be a murderer. With an explanation, but they probably all had one of those.
But if I left her to die…
Either way, the Enemy was going to get a piece of my soul. Like everything else he’d fouled in this war. It was so perfect, it might have been crafted that way on purpose.
Brenner had tempted me with his offer to take the blame himself. Which was weird, like everything else about him. I saw him as if for the first time, with his coal-scuttle helmet, white-brown camouflage smock, water bottle, bread bag, gas mask cylinder, square magazine pouches and tubular antitank rocket. His gear was all so advanced, he was like a soldier from the future, dropped into our war. But his mind…give him a bow and arrow instead of a machine-rifle, and I could see him making the same proposition to Charlemagne or Caesar.
Do we really progress? Or, despite our motorcars and radios, are we still just cavemen wrapped in pretty clothes, squeezing our fists around our machine guns just like we would a stone axe?
I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t given Brenner’s equipment a second look. But I did.
“What’s the antitank gun for?” I asked. He looked nonplussed.
“Tanks,” he said, as if afraid I was making fun of him.
“But there ain’t a whole lot of tanks in the mountains,” I said. “This is an 88-millimeter high explosive warhead,” he replied, warming to his topic. “Its shape concentrates the blast on a mathematically exact point, to burn through a hundred millimeters—four inches—of armor plate. You would be surprised at all the things that will kill.”
“Vampires?” I asked.
“Oh, most certainly.”
“And it’s loud?”
“You have heard a Tiger tank shell go off?” he asked.
“Oh yeah.” You don’t forget a world-ending cataclysm like that. “That is muffled by the mass of the gun barrel,” he said. “This is not. Yes, you could call it a loud report. You could also call the sun bright, or water wet.”
I’d thought almost the same exact words a few minutes ago. I wasn’t at all pleased to hear my thoughts echoed in Brenner’s mouth—it was more comfortable to think of us as different species, mentally. But he’d told me what I needed to hear.
“So if you shot it at the mill, say, they’d all hear it.”
“Hear and see, yes,” he confirmed.
“And run away?”
“Or toward, perhaps,” he said. “Bomb bursts mean bodies, sometimes. And therefore blood.”
“But either way, they wouldn’t just ignore it.”
“Technical Sergeant, an armor-fist is a very difficult thing to ignore.”
He hefted the weapon to make sure I knew what an “armor-fist” was.
“Good,” I said. “Get your helmet sticks all done up.”
* * *
We sneaked down closer to the mill, until Brenner swore he couldn’t miss. Given his attitude toward Hell, I wasn’t sure what he was swearing by, exactly, but it didn’t pay to look too close.
We spent more time establishing our fallback route than getting there in the first place. The trees were all dying or dead around here, but fortunately there was enough snow on the branches to provide cover. Better yet, it would muffle the noises we made beating feet out of there.
He made sure I was well off to one side of him before he triggered the armor-fist.
A hiss so loud it was more of a bang popped the bulbous warhead out of the tube like a cork out of a bottle. It flew in a smoky arc into the side of the mill, right where the roofline met the wall.
WHOPP! A hollow bang like, I don’t know, barrels of water colliding, rang off both mountain slopes and rolled down the hollow. Chips raked the barrels and boxes in the open area next to the mill, and half that side of the roof slid down to shatter on the flagstones.
We beat it out of there, Brenner abandoning the rocket’s smoking tube as he’d said he was going to do. There was a cacophony of confused noise behind us, trailing off to one side as we climbed back to the company’s hiding place.
Dave grunted and lowered his binoculars when we got there. “You got ‘em all over on that side of town,” he said when I was close enough. “Not just the mill, neither—they’re climbing up the slope lookin’ for you. But I don’t think anyone actually saw you shoot, because they’re looking in the wrong place. Just generally up, you know? That’s all they know about where it come from.”
Lodge, peering over the open sights of his Springfield rifle, chimed in.
“She’s away,” he said. “Slipped out the back an’ headed over the ridge.”
Beyond that high ground was a fold leading to a gradual slope back toward our lines. It wasn’t exactly our division’s sector, but it was still Third Army—the 77th Division, I thought, or maybe Brenner’s composite German outfit.
“She don’t seem to be making overmuch noise,” Lodge reported. “Looks like she’s clean away out of there.”
He lowered his rifle with satisfaction. I noted the bolt was back—he couldn’t have shot her, even by mistake.
“Heuchert,” I said, “Get on the crystal ball. Use the regular code, but tell Division they can’t come through this hollow without thousands of men. It’s too well held by the enemy.”
They’d have to use an alternate route to Hassberg. And so would we.
The map showed another draw, wider and flatter, east of us. That would be our next try, and there was still plenty of darkness to do it in.
“That was a pretty good idea, with the rocket,” Dave said as we made ready to move.
“Thanks,” I said. “You surprised?”
“A little,” he said. “I just figured, you know…we’d wait for dawn.”
“Dawn,” I said, stupidly.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Then we just go down and get the lady out, you know? While the vampires all hide in their basements. Or, like, if they wanna come out and stop us, they just burn up in the sun. Either way.”
I looked at Brenner. He looked thunderstruck. “I never thought of that,” he said slowly.
* * * * *
So that gap between ridges was out. We tried the other one—if that was blocked, too, we could go along the high ground, being high-stepping Recon rangers and all, but the Third Army wasn’t going to be able to use that route.
It wasn’t quite as death-blighted as the draw that led to Habachtsthal. Leaves had fallen, sure, but the trees still had their branches.
Some of which, on one particular tree, were moving independent of the wind.
I stopped still—yes, it was moving even when I wasn’t. I held up my right fist, shoulder-high. The woods got quiet.
Rattling leaves—there was still plant life up here—pinpointed the exact tree that was moving. I slipped my helmet back, uncovering my ears, but also raising my sight line above my brow. I couldn’t see a thing up there.
Something moved beside me. Dave was blinking his eyes, slowly, but steadily. He had big eyes, so when they went from white to dark it caught my attention.
I’d made the sign to freeze, so he wasn’t moving. In combat, or what could become combat at any moment, he wouldn’t dream of ignoring my orders the way he sometimes did in the rear. Obedience, even deference, served a purpose up front.
But he was blinking to get my attention. There wasn’t much of a moon, and that screened by the trees, so it wasn’t a huge risk, but even so, he thought he needed my attention bad enough to take that chance.
I glanced around. I didn’t see Brenner, but two of my own guys were staring at that tree as hard as I was. I sort of raised an eyebrow, asking the question with my eyes, but they didn’t see anything either. The tree stopped shaking.
I could swear it was leaning at a different angle now. But it didn’t look bent. I was stumped, so to speak.
Nothing for it. I slowly slid to the ground, merging with a shadow, then crawled on my belly over to Dave. My elbows found every rock on that slope as they dragged my weight along.
When I got close, he shuffled over to my ear. “Dwarves,” he hissed. “Under the roots.”
Planting a mine? Digging a tunnel? Or just waiting to topple the tree onto us?
I eased a grenade out of my bandolier. Silver twinkled on the casing where the lampblack had rubbed off. The things cost sixty bucks apiece. They were meant for vampires, who don’t care for silver, but nobody really likes fragments of jagged metal in their bodies. They’d do for dwarves, too.
Besides, the loss of shine discipline might be turned into a bonus. I held the grenade up near my helmet, turning it to catch the moonlight. Soon other twinkles flickered about the forest floor. My guys were prepping their own grenades.
As soon as that dirt-eater stuck his snout above Terra Firma, we were fixing to blow him right back to Heck.
Dave snugged the Browning Automatic Rifle into his shoulder. We always had the short guy carry the heaviest weapon. If that sounds cruel to you, just look at it this way. Most guys who get hit are hit by unaimed fire; usually artillery, but sometimes just a guy popping a few shots around a tree. Now who’s more likely to get hit by random chance: a big man or a small man? Exactly.
If we coulda measured who was the luckiest guy in the outfit, you can bet he’d carry the big gun. But since we can’t, no matter what the Christian Mysticists say, it goes by inches and pounds.
Dwarves are dense. A bullet that would kill you or me wouldn’t usually knock them down. Oh, they might bleed out after a while, but they could raise all kinds of Heck in the meantime. To put them down reliably, you needed a big, heavy bullet, heavier than the thirty-ought-six our Garands threw. Or, if you didn’t have that, you needed a whole lot of thirty-ought-sixes, all at once. Hence the BAR.
Or you could think of the BAR as the smallest, simplest machine gun one man could use by himself. Dave was supposed to have an assistant to change magazines and carry ammo, but they kept dying, and we kept accumulating more BARs. So he was pretty much his own assistant.
A wink of metal appeared in the dirt next to the tree.
Dave lined up the BAR on it and waited for my word. I withheld it, waiting for the dwarf to show more of himself above the soil. It doesn’t take much dirt to stop shrapnel, most of the time.
The dwarf shoved something up into the moonlight and I tensed. It was a thin-bottomed triangle, the color of dirt, of course, but then the bottom came free on a long, thin stick. The triangle hung there until the dwarf, still invisible under the sod, shook it back and forth. Then it flopped free. Parts of it weren’t precisely the color of dirt.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I lowered the grenade, a little.
“Let’s go meet the man, Dave,” I said louder than before. “He’s doing his best to fly us a white flag.”
* * *
The guy with the flag smiled a lot, but he didn’t say much. Just showed a grin full of jewelry. Their boss didn’t show an inch of flesh anywhere. Everything was armor, or tools, or chainlink mesh, or bits of carved rock like dull gray diamonds. He came just up to Dave’s chin.
“Huk uk nukchuk,” he said, or something like it. “Click-ik clak nik. Muk Chuk.”
Did his tongue have teeth on it, or something? It sounded like he was cutting open a can.
Dave rolled his eyes at the Moon.
“Dave? You savvy what he’s parlay-vooing?” I said.
“He welcomes me,” Dave admitted. “Says I can come down into the family tunnel whenever I want and get outta the nasty clean air.”
“A compact language, Dwarvish,” Brenner observed.
“Sounds that way, yeah,” Dave said. “But that’s cuz half of it’s hard to hear. That low buzz, it’s the vowels.”
“Well, tell him thanks, but you gotta job to do,” I prompted. Dave clack-clacked a reply.
The old boy showed sapphire teeth.
“He knows. He asks, how we going to blow up the Strudels with such crummy explosives?”
The dwarf gestured at a satchel charge Hiney was carrying. I nodded okay. Then he opened the canvas flap, took out a block of TNT, and bit right through the wax paper wrapping. He chewed a big old bite of it like black bread, crumbs dribbling out into his beard.
The detonator wasn’t even in the bag, but carried elsewhere. He could throw TNT down and stamp on it without setting it off. The manual didn’t say anything specific about eating it.
The dwarf boss rolled a long, booming sound, up and down the scale. He looked like he was laughing.
Dave grabbed the TNT out of the old boy’s hand. The dwarf didn’t like that; he showed his teeth in a less friendly way.
Dave rattled off some clicks and rumbles. The dwarf replied, slowly. Dave threw his hands around, yelling. The dwarf patted his belly and made that basso profundo laugh again, then took Dave’s chin in his hand.
Dave yelped, but the old guy held on tight. He told Dave something very serious. Dave sputtered back, but not as mad as before. Then the old guy let him go.
Dave shook his jaw back and forth. I got tired of waiting. “Well?”
“He just…he doesn’t want me getting killed because we didn’t use better bombs,” he said. “Says this stuff wouldn’t give children a tummy ache.”
“Has he a better suggestion?” Brenner wanted to know.
“As a matter of fact, yeah,” Dave said.
The dwarf held up a twinkling black crystal about as big as a baseball. Little golden bits gleamed from its depths.
“Frozen stars in a block of night,” Dave said. The old boy rumbled appreciatively.
“Crystal explosives?” said Brenner eagerly. Dave shook his head.
“No,” he said sadly, “he actually means ‘frozen stars in a block of night.’ He chipped it out of the sky one night when the Moon was down, so the stars were especially bright.”
He seemed embarrassed. I don’t know why—it’s not like it was Dave spouting Old-Worldy nonsense. He was just passing it along.
“Aha,” said Brenner softly. “Even one star is the temperature of the Sun, you know. And they are quite large, too, I believe, in real life.”
I whistled.
“That’s some grenade,” I said.
“Jawohl,” Brenner agreed. “It would be. But of course, one cannot really chip pieces out of the night sky. It is not a mineral shell covering the world, although you can understand why the dwarves believe this. So this cannot actually be a piece of sky containing real, intact stars. For which, Gott sei dank. This would be far too much explosive for the job.”
Dave was looking off into the woods. The old guy was rumbling at him, but Dave wouldn’t look at him.
“How do we set it off?” I asked.
“We touch it with daylight,” Dave said, looking away.
“So if we don’t keep it wrapped up by day, bang?” I said. “Look at me when you’re telling me something that’ll save my life.”
Dave turned around, anger and shame warring on his broad, flat face.
“He doesn’t mean real daylight, Murph,” he said. “It’s—it’s all mixed up with how he looks at things, the whole Old World bit. Daylight means pure gold, or a circle of light, or getting an idea. Like when you suddenly figure something out.”
“Enlightenment?” Brenner said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Dave said, relieved. “You got it! Enlightenment.” I threw myself on the dirt, hands over my helmet. But apparently Brenner’s epiphany wasn’t hooked up to the detonator, because the block of night didn’t explode.
“Do you have to be holding it when you have an enlightenment?” I said, getting up. There was moss on my forearms.
“It can flow along a golden wire,” Dave said. The old boy held up a wad of braided jewelry.
“Good. Because I don’t wanna have to tell the boys they can’t understand anything new no more,” I huffed. “Kinda defeats the purpose of a Recon outfit.”
Dave gestured to the dwarf boss and his buddies. More of them were peeping up out of the burrow, sneaking a look at the weirdos from Above.
“Can I tell him about the target?” Dave asked. “Maybe he knows something.”
“Keep it general,” I said. “He might be the chatty type.”
Dave grumbled and boomed with the boss some more. A couple of others came up and sniffed at my entrenching tool, fascinated. I wondered if the lower-rank dwarves ever talked at all.
“It’s a prison, he says,” Dave reported. “They keep guys there for vampires to feed on. But there’s also ritual chambers, music, and plenty of curse magic flying around. His people don’t like to go near the place; they say it’s unnatural. ‘Not of the Earth’ is what he said exactly.”
“Why do they need to practice great curses for a simple feedlot?” Brenner wondered. “It is not that difficult to pen humans like chickens, or so I would think. No supernatural aid required.”
“They’re death curses,” Dave found out after some more back-and-forth. “Does that help?”
“Well, no,” I said after Brenner didn’t comment. “I don’t know tech stuff. But if there’s prisoners there, we don’t want to paste it with artillery if we can help it. What we need to know is, how important is this place to the Strudel war effort? Do their officers starve without it? Because if they do…”
“They could simply bite one of their own men,” Brenner said at once. “Although morale would suffer…no, they could use it for discipline, perhaps. In any unit there are always offenses to be punished. That would not erode morale as much as just biting at random. And then, too, there is mesmerism. No, I do not think the vampires need to feed at a specialized facility. We have never heard of this in all the years we fight them. Unless…perhaps it is the equivalent of a reserved restaurant for general staff? Better? They do not need to feed there, but they enjoy to do so?”
I didn’t think much of that idea at all.
* * * * *
The Dwarves didn’t like the place either, but that didn’t mean they were chicken. They walked us over the mountain, through some caves made of wet chalk, and out under an overhang cut by a river that dried up a long time ago. Its bed was a natural trench with rock walls, better than we could have cut in a month with explosives.
It wasn’t that hard to find the town itself. What had happened to Waldorfsbruck and Habachtsthal had happened hard to Hassburg, happened again, and then turned around, settled in, and happened a whole lot more.
Sterility. That was the whole of this place, like the man said about the Other Place. Dead wood still loomed out of gray, crunchy soil; dead grass blew in the cold alpine wind, brushing against dead bushes. Some gray, some brown, and some fluffy white new-fallen snow fell from the clouds.
We sat there in the snow, taking stock. Listening. You always try to do that in an unfamiliar environment; listen, smell, take in the feel of it, so you’ll know when something’s out of place. Move a few steps, freeze, and listen again.
Dave raised a hand, which is unusual. He’s not our best woodsman. But we all froze, not even turning our heads, trying to look in all directions. A man can’t do that, not without drawing the eye through movement, but a patrol can. Everyone’s supposed to be covering a different sector.
Whack!
I hit the dirt, but it had only been one shot. I couldn’t tell where it came from.
Fortunately, Lodge could. He’d been some kind of swamp hunter before the war. He didn’t tell us where the enemy was; he showed us, snapping a silver tracer round to our right front. When he shot again, it was from a slightly different position. Lodge, I didn’t worry about in combat.
Our BAR men opened up, hosing down the scrub with tracers. I saw one ricochet from about waist level. There weren’t a lot of rocks up here, so that was probably our boy.
Before he could move, I put half a dozen carbine rounds on target.
I didn’t hear him fall, but when my night sight came back (gun flashes do a number on my eyesight, the same as everyone else), I could see him stretched out on the ground. Black uniform, black boots, black rifle. And where his skin showed, it was black, too.
A vampire, then. And so stuffed with blood it was bruising him.
Bloodsuckers don’t bleed, they leak. As long as they have any blood left in ‘em, they don’t die. But although they may not be using their hearts and souls much anymore, they still think with their brain housing group.
He was head-on to me, face turned to the side. I shot at his head until his coal-scuttle helmet flew off. Then I changed magazines and went to work on his bald scalp.
His head snapped around—probably Lodge, using his Garand’s .30-06 punch—and Heuchert ran up to stick him with a stake. We don’t issue stake-bayonets any more, but they’re not hard to make.
He spasmed, like you do when you’re draining back into Hell, then fell still.
I saw weird whorls of green night-light blast upward from the other side of a razorback hill, right where Hassberg proper was supposed to be. I don’t think anyone else saw them; dwarves don’t see like we do, at all, and no one else in the company—platoon, if you want to be really honest—was even partly Elvish.
The enemy doesn’t have any Elves. So those eerie beams were meant to help something else which could see in the dark.
Not a surprise, really—we’d just whacked one of their vampire troops. The spotlights told us they had more, maybe a lot more. If it was really a vampire newborn training camp, how many did they run through at a time? One? Ten? A hundred?
A hundred Draculas in a single company was more than King Co. could take on. It was probably more than Third Army wanted to take on.
Snow crunched. It was slow, but rhythmic. Someone was walking. Real slow, but not taking too much effort to stay quiet.
I couldn’t see a blasted thing.
We were still under pretty good concealment. I caught the eyes of as many men as I could. No one saw them.
Yeah, them. There were several sets of footfalls.
The spotlights continued, as did some high piping noises that I’m pretty sure the guys in my platoon couldn’t hear, either. It sounded like a big camp, with a lot of Un-dead troops. If it weren’t for the hill, we’d be close enough for machine-gun fire.
Being that we didn’t have any machine guns, and they probably did, I was doubly grateful for the hill.
But the crunching sounds were spread well out. They weren’t heading directly toward us, but they were gonna find us. At which point, the base would know where we were, unless we could take them out silently.
Some of the crunches were weirdly small. I squinted, aiming the corners of my eyes at the sound. You see better at night with the edges of your eyes, not the middle, whether your old man was human or otherwise.
Dogs.
The vampire creeping through the dead weeds had a dog on a leash. He, the vampire, was bent over almost double, his head within inches of his dog’s. The dog looked around, and the vampire followed his gaze.
The patrol was still some distance away. But they were eventually going to see us, no two ways about it. And then we were spotted, and this far behind enemy lines, spotted was probably dead.
I ruled out the carbine in my hands right away—too loud. What else did I have?
Top to bottom, then, and fast! I had a helmet, a GI steel pot. I had a helmet liner made of flexible Bakelite. It hung on a strap.
So far, nothing I could use. I imagined choking an Austrian rifleman with my helmet strap. Wasn’t going to happen.
Below that, I had an undershirt, shirt, combat jacket and a St. Hubert’s jacket over that. The Huberts would hide us from men, but they had sort of the opposite effect on dogs, who are natural hunters. Worse, they’re pack hunters, so unlike a cat, a dog who sensed us would be bursting to tell the rest of his pack where we were, including those funny half-blind packmates who went on two legs instead of four and wore removable pelts.
Under the shirt, besides a very limited ration of flesh and blood (but one more rib than most of the guys, thanks to Adam being less of a near relation), I had my dog tags, wrapped in masking tape to muffle the clink. A Miraculous Medal, my St. Hubert’s medal, my paratroop wings (purely decorative, sadly, unless there was a parachute handy), a row of fruit salad, some buttons (they don’t make noise, so we use ‘em instead of zippers), a morphine syrette in its wrapping…
I was mentally running my fingers over my chest when I stopped.
I went back.
“Fruit salad” is what GIs call the medals we wear on our Class A uniforms. If you’ve been in a year, it’s sixty percent likely you’ve earned the Good Conduct Medal, largely by not going AWOL or turning up venereal. Service in wartime got you the War Service Medal; there wasn’t any way I could think of not to have that one, at least, over your heart. If you were a hero, you’d have a Silver Star, maybe, or the new Bronze Star on its blood-red ribbon. I was a hero to rival the ages, but no one had ever seen me doing my feats of heroism, so I didn’t have any kind of a Star on.
But I did have those eleven Purple Hearts.
Used to be, the United States frowned on decorations. It’s true—medals, back in Europe, meant you were a member of a fraternal order of heroes; that’s why they’re also called “orders.” Take an enemy banner, and Napoleon would make you a member of his Legion of Honor on the spot. You got a medal, a small yearly income, and you got to attend meetings of the Legion for the rest of your life. That particular medal, in fact, got handed down from father to son, a lot like being knighted.
Well, the Thirteen Colonies were against all that royal stuff. So we didn’t have any medals. George Washington, however, wanted to recognize the men who rose above the ordinary in that very first American army, so he created, basically on his own initiative, the Order of the Purple Heart. For eighty years, that was the only award the United States issued. Originally, it really was a purple piece of cloth shaped like a Valentine’s Day heart—they called it a badge, instead of a medal or an order, so that was all right with our anti-aristocratic feelings.
But the new one, introduced back in the First War, is a purple and white silk ribbon with a heart-shaped medallion under it. It’s glossy purple, rimmed in gold, and has both Washington’s profile and his family crest on it.
I didn’t carry the actual medals on my shirt, but I had one wrapped in a handkerchief in a cough drop packet in my pocket. Call me sentimental.
Right now, though, call me desperate, and I couldn’t argue. I fumbled it out in terrible haste and held it before my eyes.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, I said silently, as I had done so often before. St. Michael, lord of the Heavenly Host, pray for us. St. Bessus, who aids the soldier in war, pray for us. St. Anthony, patron of lost things, help us to remain lost from our pursuers. St. Jude, patron of lost causes, pray that we don’t need you to pray for us. And here goes Murphy, making up his own prayer in the face of centuries of tradition…President Washington, patron of the brotherhood of the Purple Heart, intercede for us.
There. I’d said it. I could have covered myself by apologizing in advance to the Most High for my presumption, if it was unworthy, but not only does that not sound very sincere, but I wasn’t sincere in my apology. I did indeed believe George Washington would take pity on us, American soldiers in danger in the dark, if he but knew.
My punishment, which I didn’t expect, was swift. A hulking form stepped out from behind a tree, and my heart just about skidded off the road and crashed in flames. I swayed, my vision going double.
Yes, I’m tall—I’m part Elvish. We tend to be tall like willow trees. But he was tall like a massive old oak, his cape—yeah, just like Batman’s—bulking out his shape into a massive structure with an equally massive hat cocked slightly to one side. He saw me, came forward, and when Dave raised his weapon, held up a hand wrapped in a thick white glove.
“I am a friend,” he said quietly, with a soft accent very different from our Texas and Alabama boys. “Please take me to Mithrandil Murphy, and I must caution against delay.”
I came to a crouch, even though he was standing up straight.
Some habits you don’t try to break.
“That’s me, General. Uh, I mean Mr. President.”
“Neither title followed me across the River, Mister Murphy. Those are chevrons of a sort on your coat, are they not? Would you be Color Sergeant Murphy, at all?”
“Sergeant, yes, sir,” I stammered. He smiled a little, wider than on the dollar bill.
“But as I am once more on the battlefield…” he seemed to consider, “yes, General would be suitable, if you please, Sergeant. I’m told you are an American?”
“Sir.”
“But you are of the Good Folk. Peut-etre vous preferez que nous parlons en francais?”
“No, sir,” I assured him. “My old man was from France, but I’m a hundred percent Yank. Born in the U.S. of A.”
“He came over with the Marquis, in seventy-nine, then?” the General said.
Dave looked sideways at me, as if bored by the topic. Well, all right, you tell me how to talk to the Father of your Country without insulting him so much he leaves us in the lurch.
“He sure did, General,” I said. “Fought at Yorktown and the Silver Stairs.”
“And you are a grown man now,” he said to himself, “nor were any of the Fair born on the American continent prior to that date. So it must now be 1820, or surely not much earlier than that.”
“It’s 1944,” Dave put in. “Elves live a long time.” Washington looked bemused.
“Of course, of course…” he said. “Nothing remains as it was. I see I shall have to accustom myself to new ways even now, after my recall to glory. But what, if I may ask, can a very old man do for you, now, in this strange modern era…and, now that I collect my surroundings, this strange modern place?”
“We’re behind enemy lines, sir,” I said quickly. Did I want to get out a map? No, we’d have to have light to read it, the General being stuck with standard-issue human night vision. “Up against maybe a dozen enemy. But they’re not the problem—the problem is a battalion-sized base just the other side of that ridge, sir. They got plenty of vampires and who knows what all, over there. We shoot up this patrol, and they’re gonna come a’runnin.”
He nodded.
“Bushwhacking,” he said. “Creeping around in the woods, in the dark. Perhaps I may be of some assistance, after all.”
He drew his sword, a big curved number, a couple of inches. It gleamed like a mirror.
“Geez, General—” I said, despite myself. Then, since I was committed anyway, I added “The light? We gotta keep the light—”
“Indeed, Sergeant,” he said, smiling more. “But we want them to see me. Me, not you. As I suspect,” he said, opening his cloak a little to show a vast acreage of snowy-white silk shirt, “they will do readily.”
“I creep that way some considerable distance—I may draw upon one or two new methods I’ve learned in my new posting,” he said with a wink. “Then I emerge, bright and bellowing, and they follow. I lead them away from where you wish to be…which is, by the way, where?”
“Well, we want to snoop out that base,” I said. “So, uh, that way.”
“Perhaps over that rise, beyond the two thick bushes, I suggest,” he said, pointing. “They will not catch me—they cannot harm me if they do. With luck, and the blessing, your enemy’s base may just send more of its men out to look for me, and at the least their sentries will hearken to where I am, and not where you are. I’m told I can engage them, some of them at least, in battle—apparently you fight against powers of which my Superiors wholeheartedly disapprove, their supposedly vast powers of forgiveness notwithstanding.”
“Honorable Sir,” he said to Dave very slowly, “wilt thou aid us American soldiers in our strife?”
“Look at the sleeve, buddy,” Dave said. “I’m at least as American as you. Maybe more…‘least where I come from, the dead don’t vote.”
“An innovation sure to be of interest to the city fathers of Manhattan, if I place your speech correctly,” Washington said solemnly. “There, even the staunchest Tory joins the ranks of the Democratic-Republicans, once he dies.”
I gave Dave an eyebrow—Big George had him there.
“Spread the word to your soldiers,” he said to me and Dave. “Await my uproar—when they take foot after me, be ready to skedaddle.”
I couldn’t help grinning.
“Is the word not in currency anymore? Skedaddle? Is it low? I meant to hasten elsewhere vigorously,” he said.
“No, General, it’s a fine word, even today,” I said. “It just—it makes you sound like you’re in a Western.”
“But I AM a Westerner of long standing, young fellow,” he said proudly. “I made it as far as the Ohio. Ever hear of Fort Necessity?”
“General, I believe I did my basic training there. Everything in this war is necessity.”
We spread the word, and he hastened. Or creeped. He moved quietly, is what I’m trying to say.
And then he gave out a roar which would do credit to a King Kong movie.
I jumped. Dave jumped. The vampires jumped.
The dogs, on the other hand, went totally bugs, leaping at the end of their leashes. They weren’t scared of the noisy monster—they were eager to kill it.
I was doubly glad those dogs weren’t going to be between us and our objective.
The soldiers headed over there, and one of the dogs plunged into the snowy brush. It came flying out, yelping, head over heels, followed by a bear-sized apparition with massive, flaring wings and a bright, sharp sword.
We skedaddled, as quietly as we might, but I don’t think they’d have heard us anyway.
* * *
The enemy started firing once we were well away, skirting the low spot in the hill. They were shooting at Washington, I figured, but none of the flashes were directly visible, though they lit the woods.
Bap, went a rifle to our right. Then bap again.
One man, with a bolt-action. If we could get him before he started shouting, there was a good chance the noise would blend in with the patrol trying to shoot Washington. And if we could get him without a grenade, without a blast of automatic weapons fire, ideally without the flat snap of an M1 Garand, out here where all the noises were supposed to be Mausers…
Of course, he probably wasn’t a man, in the sense of a mortal man. It was still dark as sin up here above the town. Snow doesn’t outline a man very well when there’s no illumination of either the man or the snow behind him. And unless you’re a vampire, or an Elf, there’s no other way to see in the dark, that I knew of.
Dave set his BAR down and headed left without a word, pulling an entrenching tool from the top of his pack. The e-tool is a folding shovel, or pick, depending on how you tightened the head onto the handle. His was sharpened to a razor edge, then blacked with campfire smoke; it was basically an axe, but could also dig holes.
Once again, my headquarters squad was closest to the enemy. Dalton and Kassock slithered over the snow to the right, each with a bayonet in his fist. Me, I got my sharpened stake and picked a dead bush, then drifted over towards it, trying to imitate a shadow.
Bap.
So long as he wasn’t yelling, he wasn’t blowing our position. I really didn’t think we could call on any more deceased Presidents if we got spotted a second time.
Bap.
Dalton reared up and flipped over on his back, gripping his upper arm. He made a noise with his breath, but it wasn’t loud, and didn’t last longer than a finger snap. Byrd, the headquarters medic, broke cover and pounded toward him. The sentry already knew where Dalton was, anyhow.
If he fired now, knowing what he was shooting at, we stood a good chance of seeing the muzzle flash, and getting him. Of course, it’d be hard on Byrd if he didn’t miss.
Something crashed abruptly uphill, near where the sniper had to be.
Kkrasshh. Snapping noises followed by crashing brush, the drumming of a heel on frozen ground, then silence.
Hickey, a good old boy from one of the Carolinas, emerged on his hands and knees from a thicket I’d have sworn was too small to conceal a sentry. He had a Mauser rifle in his off hand; no scope, of course, as the vampires’ night vision (and mine) didn’t focus through glass.
He grinned, his teeth flashing in the snowlight, and waved us up.
The sniper lay on his front, gripping a log with both hands. A broomstick handle, presumably sharpened at the other end, protruded from his left back, right where the heart would be. Well, was. You don’t have to stake them from the front, no matter what you see in the movies.
Hickey had also garroted the guy, sinking the wire deep into his neck, before turning his back on him to notify us. I guess there wasn’t a lot else he could have done; the firing had died down back where we were before, so he didn’t dare make a noise.
I was going to make sure of the vampire anyway, probably with my own stake, when Heuchert started sawing his head off. With an actual saw. Are we prepared for everything, or what?
I looked down the line, trying to count heads in the starlight. It wasn’t easy. If I could see everyone, even with my special gifts, we wouldn’t have been very good woodsmen.
So I was creeping downslope, crouching low, when I found Dave’s body.
He’d caught Franz’ bullet right in the middle of his chest, clipping a corner of his dog tag. He wasn’t moving.
I didn’t waste time checking his breathing and all that. I just got my shoulder under his arm and heaved.
He wouldn’t come up.
If I get to you too late, there’s nothing I can do. But then, if I really am too late, all that’s left is your body, and that I can lift like any other dead matter.
But Dave wasn’t budging.
He’s big and thick, sure, but I wasn’t a weakling despite the diameter of my arms. I should have been able to move him.
But it was like he was poured into cement.
His legs were under the leaves. They rustled as he sank further. He wasn’t just anchored to the ground. He was sinking.
“Oh, no,” I gasped. “You’re not getting him.”
I didn’t know everything Dave had done before the war, but we were buddies now. I knew what he was like. He couldn’t, just couldn’t, have more sin on his conscience than Lizzie Borden. But his death was weighing a ton.
“Dave,” I panted. “Dave.” I couldn’t say any more, not and pull with all my strength.
Someone grabbed my arm to help, and someone else got hold of my waist and leaned backwards. Pruitt, of all people, got under Dave’s other arm and strained with his legs to push up. But we couldn’t hold him.
His broad waist sank steadily into the scratchy soil, then his chest. Three guys were hauling on each arm now; I don’t remember who they were.
Like an anchor, like a boulder, like the setting sun, he dragged all of us down with him until the stony dirt scraped us away.
I could have held on. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. When my hands were under the soil, I let him go.
Lodge looked grim, like he always did. Heuchert was angry.
Pruitt looked astonished, and kind of hurt.
None of them looked me in the eye.
I got up to one knee and brushed the dirt off my hands. I felt around for my carbine.
There was some dirt near the action. I wiped it off and checked the chamber. Seemed okay.
The dwarves didn’t say a word. They just went down on their knees and dug holes right where they stood, scraping with their massive hands. Pretty soon they were under. Even the holes seemed to slump after them. Then they were gone.
And so was Dave Zwergbaum.
I marked the spot. That was my concession to what I was feeling. A helmet as wide as a washtub on top of a broken-down rifle in place of the BAR we still needed. He’d have wanted it that way.
And then we left.
* * * * *
The stream bed didn’t go exactly where we wanted, but it got us within a few hundred yards. Vampire sighting distance, in other words.
I explained what I wanted in Ranger sign language; about one guy in three had been on the Ranger course. We wriggled into our St. Hubert’s jackets and started crawling.
The BAR men set up to cover us in case we got spotted. There was wire, with some new strands among the rusty ones. The poles slanted inward, not out, which made sense for a prison camp. But it wasn’t very high; one prisoner could lie on it and the others could run across his back. Which was a lot to ask, but they were going to be eaten. What’s to lose?
There were spotlights in the corner towers, which was a vast relief. Vampires don’t need spotlights; they see body heat. Their sentries were human, then. St. Hubert’s buckskins would probably get us through.
Spencer cut the lowest strands of the wire obstacle, and I slithered through on my belly.
One by one, the first squad—technically a platoon, but it was thirteen guys—followed me in. We kept watch while the other two squads joined us. One of the spotlights swung across the compound of neat white stone houses; we cast no shadows, and no alarms went up.
Pruitt and first squad followed me toward the three-story manor house at one end. Second squad headed for the rows of identical brick buildings. Third squad watched the escape route and the watchtowers. If they started shooting, we’d all have to get out while we could.
Brenner tagged along with me. He stayed in the back of the formation, which was okay, but first squad always had Heuchert as tail-end Charlie. So Heuchert tried to hang back and let Brenner go first, but Brenner clearly wanted Heuchert to go first…they’d work it out.
They did. Brenner took tail-end Charlie.
There were two sentries on the front door but no one on the side, which I figured for a kitchen entrance. Ash cans stacked nearby, pile of firewood—it added up. Even if the place was run for the benefit of vampires, the mortal staff had to eat.
The lighting was bad, so our Huberts were able to keep us invisible as long as we moved slowly. I knew the Enemy could afford a decent light bulb, so it must have been on purpose. Vampires don’t like bright lights. And if their inferiors couldn’t see very well, whose problem was that?
It must have worked—the sentries out front barely moved. I think the one on the left was sleeping, standing up.
I had a flat little Italian knife with a narrow blade that I slid into the doorjamb. I felt the pusher pin slide back—who locks a kitchen?—and held it. Hitchborn reached past me and took the knob soundlessly in his hand. I nodded.
Hitch swung the door open without a sound. I went in crouched double, with Carlson and Hess on my heels.
Empty. A crowded European kitchen, with stoves faintly smoldering. Bread was cooling on a brick shelf at three in the morning.
There was a pie and some fancy pastries—no, really. We don’t just call them that.
There was also a rack of wineglasses hanging from the ceiling.
Dozens of them. A couple of others were in a sink, dark with blood.
I was seeing a little red myself.
Brenner got my eye, then checked out a small door. Coal closet. I went over to the full-sized door, listened at it.
Nothing.
This one was locked. There’s a nifty little cantrip that pops any lock in seconds—Webster’s sells them for car doors—but there was magic in use here. Anything we did in that line, they might sense. So I let Hitchborn take out his pick and shiv and get to work.
The doorknob turned before he was done.
Then it stopped, and someone rattled a key ring. The nine of us stood there for a second, caught in the open.
I waved ‘down’ and everyone took a knee, behind cover if they could find it. Brenner remained standing and aimed for the door at head level. I gestured for him to get down, but he didn’t.
Hitchborn stepped to the side, the door opened, and I put my little Italian knife at the throat of a redheaded stringbean in pike-gray Austrian uniform with a leather apron over it.
The guy dropped the tray he was holding, but Hitchborn caught it. Brenner held his machine-rifle steady on the Austrian’s eye.
I pulled him into the kitchen while Hitchborn shut the door. His shoulder was chilled underneath the jacket.
“Sprechen Sie English?” I demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Nein!” he choked out.
“Brenner,” I said. The SS man came over, keeping his muzzle aimed. Brenner demanded, the Austro supplied. Basic economics.
“He is Slovak, not Austrian. He wishes us to know this,” said Brenner after a cloudburst of consonants. “His name is Kovach. He came to fetch more wine,” Brenner explained. I’d guessed that—wine is the same word in German—but that reminded me of something.
“You forget to clean those glasses?” I said, gesturing at the sink with my knife. “Clean off the blood?”
“Nein,” he breathed. “Das ist nicht mein Werk.”
“It is not his duty,” Brenner said.
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. I still wanted to stick him, just for being part of it. He said something else, and Brenner’s eyebrow rose.
“He says we want the newborns. They are the ones for whom the blood is served.”
I didn’t think I could be more disgusted. But then it clicked. “Newborn vampires,” I stated.
“Ja,” Brenner said. He confirmed it with Kovach.
“This is where they make more vampires?” Brenner went back and forth a bit more. “Where they choose them. They turn a man, he is a vampire forever, so they wish to make sure. Many secrets are entrusted to the Un-dead. They must make sure they are embracing the correct man—”
“Oder Fraue,” Kovach added helpfully.
“Or woman,” Brenner said. His eyes got very cold.
“Are there a lot of new vampires in the compound right now?” I wanted to know.
Kovach shook his head.
“This—class?—is not yet finished. There are still tests they must pass before the Dark Gift is passed. But already the nobles—I think the word is Oldmost—are here for the ceremony on Saturday. They travel only at night, so they have come early. There is much feasting for the Oldmost.”
Brass were brass, wherever you went. Gotta keep the generals fed and happy. But…
“Feasting on blood?” I gritted.
The Slovak spoke quickly, but carefully. He kept looking from me to Brenner to Hitchborn, but he didn’t see what he wanted in any of our faces.
“Pig’s blood for the instructors,” Brenner said. “Women’s blood for the Oldmost. It is—schiesse!—more delicate for their aged palates.”
Brenner closed his eyes. As he opened them with new determination, I pushed his muzzle away from Kovach’s head.
“Er muss—he must die,” Brenner said. Kovach’s eyes got very wide.
I clapped a hand over his mouth. My other hand was on Brenner’s rifle. If he wanted, Kovach could have clipped me and run for it, although he wouldn’t have got far.
But he had something more to say. I let him mumble it around my hand.
“He wants us to use a silver bullet,” Brenner said, slowly.
I looked hard at the guy. He was scared, sure. But not of us or our guns.
He looked me in the eye and started making a speech. Brenner kept up with him, catching up in the pauses.
“I am not yet lost to the night. If I show you what is in the basement, I ask that you put a bullet in my head. A silver bullet. For they will not be able to raise me from my grave with argent in my brain.”
“Not yet?” I demanded. Kovach rolled up his sleeve to reveal long parallel wounds. Suck marks.
“He says he had no choice,” Brenner translated. “It is not so bad, surprisingly, once you get used to the eiskalt, the coldness all the time. But they treat them like minor royalty, with much time alone. He does not want to be alone, to consider what he is becoming.”
This guy was an apprentice vampire—technically a vampire candidate, I guess, because he was still breathing.
“Show us,” I commanded. Kovach didn’t need a translation.
With my knife at his throat and Hitchborn’s pistol in his back, he walked very carefully into the center of the Kommandantur, the command post. First squad trailed after, trying to look in all directions. It wasn’t hard, because it was an old building with narrow rooms, but it was also very dark. Of course—the owners didn’t need light.
“Can you see in the dark, Kovach?” I asked through Brenner.
“A little,” he replied. “Easier in cold places. But I cannot read, or tell apart colors, without a light.”
“There’s pluses and minuses, is what you’re saying?” I said, scowling.
Kovach took a while to compose his answer. Brenner translated it at once, so it wasn’t a complicated form of words.
“I do not want to live forever as a vampire,” he said brokenly. “But I live in the Empire, either way. I do not want to die a slave. I have made a terrible choice, I know. But both were terrible.”
I didn’t know what to think—he had made a terrible choice—so I kept mum.
We passed a long hallway with niches on either side. Once they might have held tables, or anything; now they were occupied by bulky refrigeration units, like freezers with the doors off. The hall was colder than Ranger School in Scotland, which says it all right there.
My eyes said it too, and Brenner got the answer quick enough. “To accustom the cadets to winter,” he said after some back-and-forth. “The vampire feels cold at all times. He must come to find it normal, even natural, before he can be turned.”
There were little puzzles and games on chairs in the cold hall. My breath gleamed on the stone, and I could make out that there was a translucent layer between air and wall. Ice.
That hall led to a sharp bend, and the next door had rubber gaskets around the edges. “Gas?” I guessed.
“Light,” Brenner said.
The room beyond was lit with arc lamps high in the corners. There were no shadows; the haze of burnt metal hung from the ceiling, trickling up from the filaments. The cables feeding the lamps were as thick as my thumb.
We’d been up all night, in the woods, and then groping along a dark castle. The light hurt.
“This is what it feels like, when you are Un-dead,” Kovach said through Brenner. “We must endure it, so we know not to fear it.”
In beast barracks, recruits have to breathe tear gas in the “gas hut.” If you’ve never been in one, just throw salt in your eyes and wash it out with lemon juice. But be sure to snort red pepper up your nose for the full experience.
It makes you mind your gas mask drill, even though the Austros haven’t started to gas us yet. What with the vampire’s senses being sharper than ours, maybe gas wouldn’t be such a winner for them. And we don’t use it on them because, heck, you can’t poison the dead. So we weren’t the only ones with that bright idea. I was heartened that we hadn’t seen the vampire equivalent of a boxing ring, a shooting range, grenade pits, or any of that. Maybe this place wouldn’t be a literal deathtrap after all, if the staff weren’t well armed.
Kovach murmured something urgently before stepping into the arc-light chamber.
“There is one more thing that we need to see. But he wants our promise that we will not just shoot him when we see what he has been living with.”
“No promises,” I said.
Kovach led us to a basement with guards on the door. He peeked around the corner. “What is through here is the isolation chamber for the Un-dead,” Kovach told us. “Twice they have drunk from my veins, and twice I have tasted the poison that curdles their flesh. The blood does not long survive outside the living…it becomes something else, that cannot abide the light of day.”
I didn’t see what this had to do with the basement and said so.
What I got was, “The blood is the life. The Un-dead do not die, but they can get more tired than you can imagine. Nobles—no, the word is officers—who have used up their blood, lie here to rest and digest and soak up the curses of the underworld.”
That held possibilities.
“Brenner, can we trust this guy to say what we tell him to say?” He found that funny, apparently.
“I will tell him what happens if we are betrayed,” Brenner assured me. He told Kovach something in considerable Teutonic detail. Kovach got a little gray around the jaws.
“He will do as you ask,” Brenner said.
So Kovach walked two steps out from the corner, with every gun we had pointed at his middle, and told the guards to come over there. One did, one didn’t. We knifed the one who followed him out of sight of the door.
Then we didn’t have a lot of clever options, so I ran around the corner at top speed and stuck a knife in the last guard’s side. He didn’t have time to scream.
We asked Kovach when the guards changed; he didn’t know.
Brenner asked a question of his own.
“The elders sleep here most nights,” was the answer. “Three of the four sepulchers are currently occupied. Although they have dined well, they cannot hear us. They no longer feel the weight of their sins, but that means they no longer feel much of anything. Some are so far gone that they no longer even fear the Cross, although it will still flay them as always. It is so hard to get them interested enough to do anything! Many times our instruction has been delayed while they sleep.”
“Grumpy when you wake ‘em up, huh?” I said.
“No. We cannot wake them from here, this side of death. Their sleep is so deep, they cannot hear anything, feel anything. They are the next thing to truly dead.”
“Well, that ain’t good enough. Get the TNT.”
* * *
We all contributed some explosives. Hiney set them up on all sides of the big stone coffins, daisy-chained together with blasting cord so that when one went off, they’d all go off at once. We had plenty of smoke grenades, and some of those went between the charges, wrapped in loops of blasting cord.
Turned out, we had enough charges for one twenty-pound bag of TNT on each coffin. The smooth marble wouldn’t protect the vampires—it would just become shrapnel.
So I unwrapped the little block of black crystal, with the twinkling golden lights that seemed so far away, and set it gently right on top of the biggest coffin, cradled between squarish blocks of explosive.
We made our way back up to the kitchen, leading Kovach somewhat less tightly. A voice echoed off the stone outside the kitchen, coming from upstairs.
“He says to hurry up,” Brenner translated automatically. He seemed to come back into focus.
“Watch the door,” I told him. “Hitch, take this guy. We got what we came for.”
We had indeed. Some of the enemy’s elders in residence? Our artillery couldn’t ask for a better target. It’s not like they can replace a 200-year-old vampire; that takes, well, 200 years. The Allies weren’t about to give them that kind of time.
If we could keep them from finding out about us until dawn, the elders were pinned in place. They’d never see another sunset. But if they did catch onto us before then, we’d have to—
“We taking him with us, Sarge?” Hitchborn wanted to know.
He had a good question. Kovach was tall and skinny, gray under the eyes and pasty-limbed. He wouldn’t be able to sprint far, and probably couldn’t hump all night over the mountains. But if he fell behind, even dead, the enemy could get our position and movements out of him.
“Silver, you said,” I told him. He looked curiously at me. Brenner was across the room, but some of our words aren’t too different.
“Silber, ja,” he responded. “Auf der Kopf.”
He pointed at his head and made the bang-bang gesture every kid in the world knows from the movies.
I popped my Colt magazine, counted out rounds. They come from the factory with two argent to five lead, with the first silver round three bullets down. I moved both of them to the top of the stack.
And then I handed an enemy officer candidate a loaded weapon.
When you say it out loud like that, it sounds pretty stupid.
Then I turned my back, and got on with preparing a booby trap on the kitchen door.
* * *
Hiney was fooling around with fishing line and matches when the first shot cracked from outside.
It was a rifle, ours or theirs—hard to tell through the kitchen door—and then a torrent of automatic fire, which was definitely ours. Everyone who can find one carries a Thompson up in these woods.
I pointed at Eveland and Heuchert. They ducked outside, then Heuchert came back in. “It’s second squad. They’re two-three buildings over.”
“Put a timer on that thing, Hiney,” I said. “Ten minutes.”
Kovach moved over next to the satchel charge. I pointed, mimed blowing up, then gestured for him to walk away. He shook his head, holding my—his—pistol down at his side.
He said something in German with an odd smile.
Maybe he was saying he’d take one of them with him before he went. If I were saying it, though, I wouldn’t have looked so relieved.
We didn’t have a BAR—they were covering our way out. Dave would have been able to tote one and stay quiet, but nobody else could without sacrificing speed. So the riflemen among us covered the exit while the rest of us rushed across the path, into the shadow of the first brick building in line.
A searchlight turned toward the third building in the row, then third squad shot up the watchtower. They shot the other watchtower for good measure, before it could get into action.
Second squad was clear to withdraw now. But when they got to the wire, the other two watchtowers would have a clear shot at them over the rooftops.
We could see one of the remaining towers from our position. At my command, the whole squad gave it a full magazine, rifles and Thompsons both. I guess we knocked it out; it didn’t shoot or shine any lights.
Second squad wasn’t withdrawing. Third squad’s position was now known, but there was a ridge to their left. They couldn’t move without leaving our escape route uncovered. I yelled, but second squad didn’t reply.
By our lady!
“Follow me,” I said, which is a good choice when you can’t think of anything better to say. We stepped off around the brick building, heading up the row.
An Austro came out of the second building, pointing and giving orders. Brenner stitched him before he figured out we weren’t on his side.
“Achtung Panzer!” Brenner screamed in a high, penetrating voice. “Panzers auf der Nordendraht!”
Well, that got everybody’s attention. I knew “panzer” meant “tank”, and as unlikely as that was on this side of the mountains, a lot of activity erupted on the north side of the compound—the side farthest from us. He must have sounded authentic.
“Good idea,” I told him.
“You should learn the German language, Sergeant,” he replied, grinning. “You will need it in Hell.”
We came up on the third building, where several sentries were shooting into the windows. We opened up first, and down they went, although one of them did fire a shot in our direction. I looked—no one seemed hit, although they were all down on the dirt except Brenner.
The building was a barracks, facing inward from the wire. We were in the back. There wasn’t a back door, like there would have been in an American barracks, but there were plenty of windows. They were all busted out now, with glass littering the ground and gun flashes lighting the inside.
Second squad must be inside. Could they not get to the windows?
I stood up for a half-second to look inside. The room I saw was large, with bunk beds, desks, a sink and a dresser. More a dormitory than a barracks.
The door into the building was off its hinges, and smoke hung in the air.
I motioned Spencer over and gave him a boost inside. Then I got a boost from Heuchert. I cleared the broken glass with the butt of my carbine, and the rest of the squad followed.
The interior walls were brick, too. Good thing, because shots were popping from everywhere. A hole appeared in the ceiling, apparently from a bullet fired on the floor above.
The floor and walls shook with thunder. Hiney’s satchel charge had gone off. Dust squirted from between every brick in the wall. I didn’t hear Kovach’s pistol—couldn’t have—but I tried to. Wanted to. I guessed the dwarf sunlight bomb didn’t sound like anything special. That’s if it exploded at all. Then I remembered—it took an enlightenment to set it off. We should have thought of that before we—
At that exact moment, sunlight burned the mortar out from between every single brick in the wall facing Austro headquarters.
The shockwave blew bricks all over us, me and the other guys in the room. Fortunately, blew was the word, because the bricks had disintegrated into powder before they slapped our faces. It was like being shot in the face with a shotgun full of sand, which does beat buckshot but hasn’t got a lot else to recommend it.
None of us were blinded, exactly—we hadn’t been facing the explosion square on—but we had to blink hard to get the grit out of our eyes. It stung, even worse than the flash-blindness did. But eventually enough moisture collected that I could see again. Call it tears if you want to—you’d have been watering your own face too if you were there.
Brenner wiped his eyes with his fingers, which made me flinch.
But it got him back into the fight quicker. He jerked his head around the doorframe and back again. Rifle fire popped from the right. Their 7.92mm sounds sharper than our .30-06—it was the enemy shooting at him, not our own men. With his German uniform, either side might have taken a shot at him.
Brenner stuck his rifle around the corner and ripped off a burst, then leaned out with his shoulder jammed into the frame. He took two rapid shots a moment later. Someone yelled in pain.
Brenner ducked in to reload while Heuchert and Spencer leaned out of the door, firing.
Then three of us were across the hall, kicking in the opposite door and shooting the place up. We didn’t dare throw grenades down the hall until we knew where our own guys were. But the enemy didn’t have that problem—by the time he figured out where we were, we’d better be spread over several rooms.
Our Thompsons kept the enemy’s heads down while we leapfrogged up the hallway.
There was an open area up ahead, where the shooting had mostly stopped. I charged across ten yards of hardwood, skidded to a stop, my carbine up and searching.
I felt cold fear wash over me like getting caught cheating in school.
At least one vampire elder knew we were here, all right. He was windmilling his arms in the middle of the room, screeching like a gut-shot dog, rags flying off his gray, pockmarked body. The edges of the room were heaped with furniture, helmets, and way too many bodies.
He looked up at us. There were too many teeth for his entire face, never mind the mouth. His eyes looked like the back of 8-balls, black and round and slightly glossy. Then they filled with dark red and it was like looking down a well of blood.
“Auf die Brustungen! Alarm!” he demanded in a voice that rolled in my guts.
We didn’t auf the brustungen, or brustungen the auf. Whichever the verb was, we didn’t get it. All except Brenner, who leaped to obey.
They scurried around the corner, leaving the rest of us standing there with our faces hanging out.
The face full of fangs snarled a long string of consonants from below those dark-red eyes. I felt the words like a series of slaps.
“Brenner!” I called out.
“Here, around the corner,” Brenner came back at once. “I can resist, I think, as long as he does not see me.”
His Countancy was getting impatient, now. He said most of the same words again, but higher, faster. They crawled in my skull.
“What does he want?” I said, keeping my head pointed forward. I didn’t want him to know Brenner wasn’t scurrying to obey his will.
Now he was talking slower, making sure us dimwits got the picture. Brenner translated between threats.
“You will be impaled for this, your slowness…go and fetch your master…whoever it is, whatever century this is, I don’t care…go get him, someone who knows something, or I will tear the blood…tear the blood from your corpse and send THAT to fetch your betters!”
I nodded; it wound up being more of a bow.
“Around the corner, guys,” I said out of the side of my mouth. We hustled to obey.
I mean everyone hustled out of there, even Lodge, our cold-eyed killer. Kovach was there, too, in the wide flagstoned corridor outside.
“Sarge!” Pruitt hissed.
“Shut up!” I shot back. “Brenner, who is that guy?”
Kovach answered first. “That’s Die Alte. The Old One. He was asleep when I came here, in ‘42…you must have wakened him.”
Brenner translated for us, then corrected Kovach. “It. Not him. It.”
“He’s the big boss, the head vampire?” I asked.
“He was…the first. He is the eldest of all the vampires in the Empire. Maybe somewhere there is one older, but perhaps he, himself, is the one who first earned this terrible curse from Above.”
“Yeah, yeah, terrible curse. So if we kill him, all the lesser vampires are freed from their curse?”
Kovach looked appalled at my ignorance. “What? Who do you think you’re fighting, here?”
“Dracula meets the Kaiser, ain’t that pretty much it? With machine guns.”
He gave up.
“No. You cannot free the vampire by killing its master. And you cannot kill this master, anyway. Better men have tried.”
“Such as?”
“Such as Jan Sobieski!”
“Never heard of ‘im. Local champ?”
“Of Poland. But yes, a champion. But of course you have heard of Frederick the Great.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question, but it deserved an answer. “Uh…nope.”
“How do you expect…study takes so little time! Do you know nothing of your enemy?”
“Us Yanks don’t have time for study, pal. Too much to do. We generally jump in with both feet and figure it out as we go. It’s worked out swell for us so far; you oughtta try it.”
“Yes! Jump into the darkness, with sword and stake…that, too, has been tried before! You know Vlad Tepes, the real Count Dracula? You have not heard of Frederick the Great, oh no, but Dracula: him, you know!”
Now we were in my corner of town. I nodded, exaggerated and slow, so he’d get it. He didn’t speak English, after all.
“Sure. Dracula. Abbott and Costello fixed his wagon; that’s the only one I’ve seen.”
“The real Count fought Die Alte. He died. In three days, he rose from the grave, his heart churning with Die Alte’s blood. He’s around here somewhere…he taught us bats.”
“So he’s bad news?”
“The worst,” said Brenner and Kovach together. Now I knew how to say “worst” in German.
Then we couldn’t leave him alive—well, active—in our rear. When you raid a place, that’s exactly what you should do: leave the strongpoints alone and move away from them. But this strongpoint could follow us.
It may have been the wrong decision. But a good plan executed violently now is better than a perfect plan executed later, etc., etc.
I swung my arm in a “forward” gesture and stepped around the corner, firing as I went.
The guys were behind me, shooting into corners, and pretty soon we saw Die Alte, crouched like a ragpicker over one of our dead.
I shot him—why not?—and that every-fifth-bullet that was silver came up first time.
Another hole appeared on his bony chest. I gave him some more, but those holes closed as fast as I made ‘em.
He’d been shot with a lot of silver already, though. We did have thirteen guys shooting him. What I thought were pockmarks like skin lumps were bullet holes. He wasn’t bleeding, wasn’t even leaking, but blackness pulsed inside those wounds.
He raged at us. His curling consonants tingled my nerves.
I’ve been in the Army a while—granted, a Christian army, but still—and I’d never heard a stream of profanity to compare with his. It was inspiring, in a way.
More than in one way; some of his wounds closed up as he spat more curses. He flicked his arm downward; something round flew off his fingernails and bounced off the floor. I didn’t want to see whose head it was.
Die Alte wiped his hand on his leg and groped in the splintered furniture. He came up with a machine pistol.
Considering he was already walking around after death, that extra advantage didn’t seem hardly fair. Dracula never shot anyone in the movies.
One of my bullets hit his gun, knocking it aside, but he swung it right back into line and chugged off a couple of shots. Pruitt screamed. Then Die Alte spit a bloody German curse down his chest when his gun jammed.
His side had spent all those years perfecting their evil spells, after all. They couldn’t be bothered to design a reliable automatic weapon.
Brenner leaned in and hosed Die Alte down on full auto. That got his attention. He turned eyes like black cueballs on us, and little red pupils blossomed in their depths.
“Turn away, Murphy!” Brenner said. Of course I did no such thing.
The cold bit worse. It wasn’t just the shock of seeing second platoon spread out like a shell had hit them. He was doing something to us.
I shot him some more, but my fingers seemed to swell up and grow heavy. I stopped.
I stopped everything—shooting, breathing, seeing. My vision was a dark blur with carnage at the edges. I couldn’t see the elder, nor shoot him if I did. My chest started to feel heavy, too.
Then it lightened, and I could see again. The elder was backing up into a corner, making a different, equally horrid screech.
Beads tinkled on my carbine’s stock. My rosary had come out of my sleeve, with the crucifix on the end swinging free.
So it really did work! With that kind of advantage, we had no business losing to this ugly old killer.
“Get around beside him!” I told everyone around me, and held up the little crucifix on the chain of beads.
The elder backed away so fast, so panicky, that he was jammed in a corner before you could shoot twice.
We shot him so full of holes that his torso was one big wound. Like craters in mud, the holes were filling themselves in, but we made new ones faster. He lunged for a doorway across the room, but Spencer brought him down with a shot to the kneecap.
Then everyone had to change magazines at once. “Hurry up!” I yelled. “I’ll hold him!”
I got right up to him, pressing the cross like a blazing torch. He had nowhere to go.
And his head came up from its crouch, yellow fangs grinning.
He looked really pleased with himself as he swept the cross out of my hand.
“Ze White Chrrrr—AACH! Filth and brutality!” He wasn’t grinning any more.
His claws ripped my wrist open; a thunderclap of shock sucked me to my knees. There was no pain.
“Ja, zat hurts me. HE hurts me.”
He brought the cross to his lipless teeth and licked my blood off the image of Christ. Then he bit down. Two of his teeth turned black and withered, but the little cross snapped in half.
“But you: I would not even soil my fangs with your dungwater blood. You are nothing.”
He’d suckered me in. And that was about to become literal.
He was already bent over in his fake-panicked crouch. Now he leaned forward at the waist, gripping my elbow with one hand. His face dropped to the wound.
“Ziss, howeffer, is war. You should not sink it an honor,” he advised me.
Now there wasn’t pain, but cold, terrible crawling cold. What he’d radiated before was like a cool shower, compared to an ice bath.
I brought up my carbine left-handed to shoot him in the head. He slapped it aside, breaking it in half. Heuchert lunged with his stake-bayonet, and Die Alte yanked my arm to the side, smacking him aside with my whole body. Heuchert went down on top of Spencer, arms and legs overlapping. The elder jabbed a handful of claws into the both of them.
Brenner reared up behind him. He’d been between me and Die Alte’s bum rush—I’d marked him down as dead without realizing it. But he was alive, with a piece of splintered walnut in his hands.
He jammed my broken carbine stock into Die Alte’s back and leaned on it.
Die Alte looked up, his mouth black with my blood. He was grinning again.
He turned, swinging his arm at Brenner, but Brenner had dropped to the floor. Die Alte still had me by the other hand. He didn’t weigh much, being dried out, but his grip was like iron.
My fingers still stung where he’d wrenched the carbine out of them. Before they went numb, I got my hand around his wrist, so both my arms were attached to one of his. I took a deep breath, feeling the room go light as I teetered on the brink of death.
And stood up.
I pulled. Die Alte felt like a straw dummy, bulky but not particularly massive. I could budge him with one hand.
He had turned back to slap me silly, Heuchert and Brenner defeated, when the first color bloomed on his cheeks.
He stopped grinning then.
I leaned back, hauling with both arms, the torn one and the healthy. He’d been dead for so long, he probably didn’t recognize what was happening to him. If he’d just smacked me once, strong as he was, I’d have been too dead to pull him any further out of the Pit.
But he didn’t know what was happening. And he hesitated.
I ground my heels into the parquet floor, tugging for all I was worth. Lips bloomed from around his teeth. Hair sprouted from his withered skull, which was thickening with life. I hauled him all the way up into the land of the living, kicking and fighting every inch of the way.
Life and air and awareness flowed into him, into his again-mortal body. The one with a broken carbine and fifty bullets in it.
For a moment, he was alive, hideously alive, though he had so many wounds they overlapped another. He shrieked, a recognizable human noise, before the trauma of his wounds choked him. He fell at my feet, a mangled old man in bloody rags.
And died again.
* * *
I gripped my elbow tightly, trying for the pressure point to stop the bleeding. I wasn’t ready to check out yet; I could tell this kind of shock from that kind of shock. They’re pretty easy to distinguish once you’ve felt ‘em.
If Die Alte had remembered what it was like to die the last time, he could have saved himself. But I guess he didn’t dwell much on the past.
A guy in an enemy uniform showed up, no helmet, no weapon, still pulling on his jacket. Someone who was still alive shot at him and missed. He got out of there.
I wrapped my wrist in a bandage I’d kept tucked in a wax-paper packet. It wasn’t bleeding too bad now, but it stung like a hornet.
Spencer was moving, trying to get out from under Heuchert. He was alive, then. I gave him back his rifle.
Brenner gave me a grin, but said nothing. He was panting hard, breath rasping.
I checked Heuchert’s pulse—you never know for sure—but I had a feeling. It wasn’t because of my old man’s love-em-and-leave-em relationship with death, either. I’d just seen enough of it to know.
He had that texture that told me it was too late. The pulse didn’t contradict me.
The other guys were pushing past me, now, searching through the wreckage. They found a couple of the second squad still alive, and gathered up the dog tags of the dead.
We had enough men standing to get the casualties out, although we wouldn’t be moving very fast. Hitchborn found me another carbine, because it fit the ammo I was carrying.
We dragged the dead, including the former elder, into the center of the room, while I was trying to look in every direction for enemies. So far, so good.
I was too late to save Heuchert. But I still had one duty to perform for him.
In a war with the Un-dead, you can’t afford to be taken alive. Even recently dead is too much to risk, for us but mostly for them, the dead themselves. That’s why we carry all these smoke grenades.
Because the way Uncle Sam makes a lot of white smoke, fast, is to light off a pound of white phosphorus.
We tossed one at their heads and one at their feet on the way out. The smoke filled the room instantly, lit from within. It smelled like the world’s biggest matchstick.
I felt the heat nip at my neck as we rushed down the hall. We’d take a different window on the way out, in case someone had a bright idea.
They didn’t. Hiney’s bomb—plus the dwarf crystal—had removed the white stone Kommandantur from existence and shattered every wall facing it. Brick structures were ablaze, and monsters were shrieking from a dozen different places in the compound. They really don’t like fire, either, which is hard luck, because that was mortal man’s first trick ever.
Third squad didn’t blow our heads off when we emerged from the windows. But that may have been because they were firefighting with an enemy squad at the end of the row of brick barracks.
Like the Germans, the Austros really love machine guns. And they’ve gone to more trouble than we have to make ‘em portable. That squad had two of them, and their buzzsaw rattle was shaking the ground apart right where we wanted to exit.
I counted four guys who didn’t have wounded draped over their backs. Me, Spencer, Brenner and a new replacement with a long jawbone.
“Grenades,” I ordered, and we all stood up.
Flames billowed out of the barracks windows behind us. The white phosphorus was eating the timbers alive. We threw ourselves forward and down, getting every single muscle and bone into throwing the grenades downrange.
They all went far enough; they scattered some, but with grenades that can work out all right. They all blew at the same time. Those machine guns stopped hammering, and everything else got quiet and blurry.
There wasn’t a lot of smoke from our grenades. We could see someone still moving over there. The guys with the wounded hurried across the open, while me and the other able-bodied poured fire into the corner. Third squad joined in.
The carrying party got between third squad and the enemy. They weren’t supposed to, but things will go wrong. For a moment, it was just me and my three guys hosing down the machine gun position.
You can only suppress so hard. One of the Austros took what we were throwing and squeezed off a string of tracers. Brenner’s legs stopped working.
I hit the gunner and he stood up to his knees, still moving—lousy carbine—then bent back to his weapon. Spencer lit him up with rapid fire, and just as his Garand pinged empty, the gunner jerked sideways and lay still.
I got Brenner around the shoulders while Spencer beat it for the hole in the wire. Third squad held it up for him and the others. I didn’t see whether the new guy made it out or not, because Brenner was squirming around.
“Leave me,” he gasped. “Horse apples…”
“No. Listen. I know where I am going. It is where I belong.”
His battle smock was wet from the hips—he’d been hit in an artery. I got ready to heave, expecting him to go any second.
He did, sort of. That sweat burst out on his forehead, like it does, but he didn’t drop. He tightened himself. And something yanked down hard.
I fell to my knees, pulled down by his sudden weight.
“Do not risk yourself to save me—it cannot be done,” he was saying.
“Urgh…shut up and help me pull!”
He didn’t really weigh a ton. But something had a hold of him, hooked deep inside, and it was strong. Stronger than me.
I couldn’t hold him up. And he wasn’t helping.
“You are not one of the inferior races. Listen to reason. Elves are good at logic, not so?”
“I’m also Irish. We’re good at stubbornism!”
“This is not a word I understand!” he screamed. His arm was pulling out of his jacket.
“Neither is ‘quit.’” I gritted, and clamped down hard. His spatter-colored sleeve tore off his tunic, but I had a grip on the arm inside.
And just like that, zzwit! He was in Hell. But not gone. Because I didn’t let go.
* * * * *
Death is a slope. Steep at first, with ashes underfoot. You can’t do anything but get low and try to drag yourself to a stop, before the clinkers get too hot. Depending on your situation, eternity-wise, it can be more like a hill, or more like a cliff. Some guys said it was like a gently sloping meadow, but none of them had been in much combat.
The first drop-off comes right after you hear the babies crying. Crowds of ‘em. They’re right below the crumbly lip, where the ashes accumulate, soggy with tears. Not enough to hold your weight, not if you’re like most guys; on the other hand, if you’ve dug your hands in real good on the first slide down, your boots can most times keep you from going over. The way you do it is like in Alpine training; you splay your legs outward with your feet flat against your fall, so you pile up the maximum amount of resistance. Sort of like making an angel in the snow.
But an angel was too much to ask for.
We weren’t moving all that fast, but whatever had a hold of Brenner was much stronger than me. We whipped over the first drop, hit gravel, scraped through that. There was another drop-off, longer, with oily liquid at the bottom. I got the slightest whiff of the stuff before we were under the surface. It wasn’t blood; it was worse. If ashes, dry sand, and roasted rocks could be condensed into liquid form, that dead liquor might have smelled like that lake on the lip of Hell.
Then we fell through the liquid. We didn’t sink, we fell.
The bottom was hard and jagged. Brenner dragged me over another lip, and the wetness was gone. Just gone, like it had never been. Even the smell was gone.
I was in red-brown clouds that smelled like iron. A puff of smoke whipped past me, headed upwards like a bat out of someplace.
That’s when I realized I was still falling.
I broke through the sulfurous fumes and into clear, burnt air. Little lights glowed all around. The ground rushed up with shocking force.
There was an instant of incredible pressure, rather than pain. Then I was sprawled on a tilted slab of scorching brown rock, under a sky that seemed perpetually aflame. The fall hadn’t killed me.
I was in Hell. And of course, no one dies in Hell. That would be too easy.
I was in a canyon between jagged vertical peaks. Brenner was on another rock formation not far away. There was a sullen stream of gray between us, a little too wide to jump.
The mountains on the sides of us ended with abrupt, shattered angles. Above them were wide, dim lights, like smeared-out stars. Smaller filaments glowed between them. They stretched high into the gray clouds, almost to the zenith. Smaller mountains, like the ones around us, clustered in irregular rows, diminishing with distance. On the slopes of one of them was a city, glowing yellow with firelight.
The horizon snapped into scale all at once. The blobs in the sky were cities, far away and up above. We were in the bottom of a colossal bowl, and the walls were hundreds of miles away. Maybe thousands, if the cities were big enough.
I looked straight up. If there were cities and mountains there, we were in a hollow sphere.
Instead, the sky overhead was dead black, with a tiny, painfully brilliant pinpoint in the center. It scintillated, throwing darts of every color at once. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, and infinitely far away.
I couldn’t look at it any more. I was about to cry.
Instead, I headed for Brenner. The smell stopped me; it was familiar from Woodlawn when I was a kid, when me and Stevie Hasen would make lead soldiers out of the sash weights in his mother’s windows. The stream was made of molten lead.
Brenner cocked his Luger.
“I told you, Mick,” he said cheerfully. “There was nowhere else I could end up.”
“So now I’m Mick, and not Tech Sergeant Murphy?” Because everyone needs to be challenged, all the time. Comes with the stripes. “I am no longer in the Army,” he answered cheerfully. “I am dead. So yes, now, you are Mick.”
He shot at the shadows under the cliff behind him. Something yelped.
The shadows came alive with eyes. His gunshot had attracted attention.
They shuffled toward us on broken limbs, dragging chains behind them. Although dirty—sooty, I suppose—they weren’t the same evil mess as the vampire had been. Everything about them was human, except the eyes.
Even the Un-dead don’t have such empty eyes.
He shot another, and another. They’d been coming toward us with hands raised like claws. They weren’t trying to surrender.
But if he wanted to scare them off, he failed. They started trying to run toward us.
“Are you so inured to pain, you dead men?” Brenner demanded. “I think you have just forgotten how unpleasant it truly is!”
He started shooting for soft spots on purpose. I shot, too, because they looked like they were planning to eat us. But I wasn’t enjoying it.
Officers carry extra pistol magazines. The rest of us are lucky to scrounge holsters; I heard the dead man’s click way too soon. I still had a smoke grenade. I laughed, thinking about trying to set Hell on fire.
Brenner and I backed toward each other, the river of lead between our backs. His Luger clicked dry just as we ran out of room to retreat.
He brandished his wooden stake. It was long and wickedly sharp.
My flick-knife didn’t look like much compared to it.
“Hey, why didn’t you use that on the elder?” I said despite myself.
“I dropped it,” he said. “Your rifle was handier.”
He took a couple of quick steps into the molten metal, splattering the rock with silvery splashes. His boots stank of sulfur, but he wasn’t burned.
“As I hoped, merely a few centimeters deep!” he crowed. “Mind you, I wouldn’t want to stand there for any length of time.”
The damned hesitated to touch the gurgling lead flow. Maybe Brenner really had reminded them of pain.
Those on my side of the stream, however, were scrambling at the base of the tilted slab we stood upon. Bare feet didn’t grip the crumbly rock too well.
“You gonna apologize?” I demanded.
“It was your stubbornism that brought you here, not mine,” Brenner said. “I suppose I am sorry you are here, but even there my record is mixed. I am glad I am not here alone. For an Ami, you are a good soldier.”
“For an Ami?” I choked. If ever there was a time no harm could come from swearing, this would have to be it. But habit dies hard.
Their calls were in a hundred languages. None of them sounded friendly. Except one, sort of. It was Kovach.
Well, of course it was. Where else was he going to end up?
He stumbled toward me, keeping his footing on the chunks of weathered basalt. He was a lot more spry than the rest of the tattered dead. Maybe I was wrong about his athletic potential—or maybe he hadn’t had time to dry out.
“So, my enemies pursue me,” he said when he got closer.
“You’ve got some sense of humor,” I observed.
“Ah, well, this is better than I expected,” he said, coming up to our perch. The damned must have thought he was one of their number, because they didn’t bother him until we hoisted him up beside us.
“Better than I deserved? Perhaps not,” he went on. “But one must not ask for perfection.”
“You got a vocabulary all of a sudden. When’d you learn English?”
“When you learned Slovak, I suspect. Not long ago.”
The quickest of the damned clawed his way up to us. Kovach grappled his wrists. I smacked him back with my entrenching tool. Brenner stabbed the next one with his stake, but it broke when the guy fell back.
Their bodies knocked the others down to the base of the slab again, so we had a few more seconds.
The next rush was all together. We struggled and struck, backing up or rushing down as the crowd ebbed. Kovach still had my Colt, and was smacking hands with it. Which seemed petty, but every time he hit them, the hands let go, sending their owners down the slope again. A couple of the damned got organized. One grabbed for Kovach’s hand as soon as he swung the pistol butt. They yanked him off his knees, down into the throng, and closed over him. He was lost under shuffling bare feet and red dust.
I went for him, but Brenner grabbed my arm. His shake of the head told me it was too late.
I was going anyway. But then another set of raggedy-arms got into my face, and I had to beat him down.
Kovach heaved up beneath the mass of damned souls, throwing them to the side. He was laughing. “There’s no fear anymore! Once I am in Hell, nothing worse is going to happen. Ever! It makes a man mighty, to be without fear! It makes a man glorious!”
“Get up here, you damned fool!” I shouted. It wasn’t a curse—it was a description. But he just kept swinging, holding the dead back by sheer enthusiasm.
Gravel clinked on the stones around us. I jerked my head backward—were the damned throwing rocks now?
But that group was still on the other side of the molten stream.
They hadn’t chucked anything.
The light from the burning sky changed color, a little. Brenner looked at me quizzically. I got the picture just in time, and ducked under my helmet as the rocks started pelting down.
There was a hole in the cliff, far above us. Rocks were crumbling out of its edge. And a big iron crowbar poked through from inside.
Dave Zwergbaum was just about the last person I expected to see in Hell. Although I guess he wasn’t technically in Hell yet, since he was sticking his head out of a hole in the side of a cliff, way up off of the ground.
He spotted us pretty quick. Everything else was brown, black, or red.
“Brenner, look!” I said.
He looked up, then back down to grapple with a sooty bum who’d rushed up another guy’s back. They both slid down halfway to the crowd, then Brenner got a boot under his enemy’s armpit and kicked him free. The damned hauled him down, clawing him in their eagerness to get up to us. They really hated us.
“What did we do to them?” I yelled. Brenner howled with laughter.
“Typical American. Hell is so unfair!” he roared.
I really didn’t have anything to gain from punching him in the teeth. Good thing Dave dropped the chain about then.
It was a glittering thing of snowflake delicacy, a chain of gold and diamonds sparkling against the smoke and horror of the Pit. Dave reached behind him and a set of iron gloves handed him coils of jewelry. He reeled out armfuls of it, dropping down and down that red cliff face until it dangled a little above arm’s reach.
The damned shrank back from its glimmer.
“It’s okay, Murph!” Dave yelled from up top. “It’s woven from sunlight, see? They can’t stand the light of day!”
“When did you get religion all of a sudden?” I shouted back. “And hang it lower!”
“What religion? It’s all in the mind o’ God, right? He loves a good story!” Dave said, smiling broadly. He was enjoying Hell way, way too much.
“Dave, I’m…sorry you’re in Hell, but I couldn’t hold you,” I said.
“Course not—I’m a Dwarf!” he crowed. “The Old Guys pulled me back down into the Earth, showed me what’s what. Facts don’t lie, Murph,” he shouted proudly. “What you see is what you get! Looka this thing. This beautiful piece o’ work right here? I wove it myself—the dwarves showed me how. I made this part outta sunrise, I swear to God. Strands o’ dawn.”
He shrugged energetically. Yes, it’s possible.
“Some o’ the knots were tricky,” he said, “but Great-Grandpa fixed ‘em for me. It works!” “You’re sure?” I demanded.
“Sure I’m sure. But say, if you don’t wanta be saved by dwarf-gold, I can just haul this back up—”
I jumped higher than I’d known how before. I touched the chain with one hand and pulled it down with me.
The damned were leaving us alone for now. I passed the chain around my waist, then offered the free end to Brenner, but he pointed to the smoke instead.
On our side of the stream, the smoke was billowing out of the fissures making up the base of the cliff. Wings were stirring the smoke, hanging way too far off the ground. The things that were coming were huge, although I couldn’t see them clearly. Their steps scraped the rock raw.
But the sound was somehow soft.
A layer of smoke whirled aside for a moment. I saw a congregation of lumps lurch sideways, each of the swellings composing its body pulsing at a different rate. It hauled its bulk forward with a massive, lopsided arm. Nails and other things broke off against the jagged stone.
One of the damned, flailing his arms, ran between us and the thing. It snatched him off the ground in an eyeblink. As he kicked and struggled, the demon, if that’s what it was, stuffed the guy’s body in between the muscles on his massive right arm.
Those muscles fought, too. Just like the man they were swallowing. The demon’s arm was made of human beings, twisted together but still alive.
So was the rest of its body, I now saw. The nose was a knee, the eyes gaping mouths. I don’t know what the jagged hole at the bottom of its face had been once, although it was clearly trying to approximate a mouth now.
A lot of time seemed to pass before I shook myself alert. The chain was still hanging there, so I guess that moment in Hell wasn’t really very long.
“C’mon!” I said, and hooked the chain under Brenner’s arm. I shook it a couple of times, like you do in the mountains. It held. Dave made the high sign and the chain pulled tight.
It went very tight. It wobbled like a fiddle string, higher and higher till it caught. We didn’t budge.
The chain was like a bar, cutting into my palm. “Hey, Murph!” Dave yelled. “You’re hung up!” Brenner smirked, but his words were flat.
“The weight of my sins…” he said. “I wonder, Mick, are you strong enough?”
I couldn’t bend my elbow at all. My upper arm was stretching, horribly. And the pain!
Brenner wasn’t laughing now. “Even your little friends have not the strength to lift my curdled soul,” he said. “But I do not need you now.”
He unwound the chain from around his arm, ducking under to clear it. I grabbed him by the upper arm.
The thing I’d seen before was still fiddling with its own arm. It broke something open, dug around inside it, and came up with a rack of ribs. It set them firmly in place as a set of curving claws, flexed its fingers, and grunted. It was ready.
“I will be in the worst part of Hell,” Brenner assured me. “I am penetrating into the Enemy’s rear areas! Perhaps I can disrupt their supply lines, confuse their reinforcements. Anything I can do helps our mission, ja?”
The damned, and their big buddies, were closing in. If I didn’t get out of here soon, Dave and his Old Folk cousins were going to be at the end of a bright golden line leading right to them. As much as I hated the idea of leaving anyone in Hell, I didn’t owe Brenner their lives.
I could have held onto him. Could have kept fighting. You hear a lot of “You did what you had to do,” but I didn’t have to. I made a decision.
I opened my hand.
Brenner grinned. He rushed the closest of the shambling dead, smashing her in the head with his shovel. Kovach grabbed her by the neck, pulled her down, and clambered up beside him.
Brenner was shouting.
“Tell them! Tell everyone we are fighting, here below the lines! Tell them!”
The chain links rattled as the slack took up. I seemed to rise from my feet, with no feeling of tension. It was like when a lot of guys are carrying a weight—it feels like no one’s actually doing the work.
It seemed a very long time before the chain pulled me up over the edge of the hole. All that time the image of Brenner and Kovach fighting with the damned got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. But they never stopped coming.
* * * * *
K Company, 134th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division Nov 23, 1944
Commanding Officer: none
First Sergeant: T/Sgt Murphy, M Prepared by: Cpl Loftus, B.
Present and Fit for Duty: 28 Detached: 14
Hospital: 8?
CO HEADQUARTERS 5
Murphy, M. T/Sgt Loftus, B. Cpl.
Hickey, M. Kassock, I. Dalton, D.
1ST SQUAD 8
Zwergbaum, D. Cpl Woodhead, N.
Stevens, J. Burgess, H. Van Deusen, B. Fitzgerald, K. Hodge, J. Vollert, K.
2nd SQUAD 6
Lodge, P. Szymkovic, E. McNeill, O. Spencer, K. Nelson, P. O’Connor, M.
3rd / WEAPONS SQUAD 9
Larsen, L. Finkelstein, J. Pruitt, D. Hitchborn, M. Thomen, J. Ross, S. Hiney, R. Eveland, R. Perdue, J.
KIA
Heuchert, D. Trasky, S. Rosetti, M. Brenner, M.
WIA
Hickey, M.
Leuders, D.
They were all waiting for me back at the CP—Colonel Denton, another colonel wearing Air Corps batwings, a one-star general I didn’t know, and a British three-squares-and-a-crown officer for some reason. And behind him, smiling like he’d caught a defenseless puppy, the Excellent Master of the Oaken Hunt himself.
I was getting my story straight at sixty miles an hour—how could I be in enough trouble to bring in the Air Corps, the Brits and the goshdarn Elves, too?—when Denton pounded me on the back.
“Goddamned glad to see you, Sergeant!” he said, shocking everyone except the Excellent Master. “Your men okay?”
“Those that made it, yes, sir,” I replied. “Not too many wounded this time.”
“And you’ve a clear recollection of what you saw—Down There?” asked the Brit.
“Oh, yeah, sir,” I assured him. “Guess I’ll take those pictures to my grave.”
“Not yet, you won’t,” said the one-star. He wore a branch insignia I didn’t know, crossed arrows and a dagger. It was a little like the Marine Raiders used to have, back when we were still fighting the Deep Folk in the Pacific, but the strange part was that the Army didn’t have hundreds of branches, the way we have a hundred-and-some divisions. Infantry, Armor, Coast Artillery, Sappers, Invocational Warfare—there wasn’t one I didn’t know. Must be something new.
“Sergeant Murphy, my name’s Frederick,” he said. “My outfit needs men like you. All the men like you we can get.”
“General, you can get a thousand guys like me in half an hour—” I tried to say. There had been talk of getting up an Elvish-American battalion, like the Japanese-Americans in the 442nd, for “special service” with the Elves. I liked the idea just barely more than where I’d been.
The Excellent Master bared teeth that looked like a mouthful of needles. I think he was trying to be friendly. My neck turned to ice—that’s a metaphor, he wasn’t really hexing me. But Frederick was still talking.
“Murphy, you’re one of the only men we have who has been to the Other Side and returned alive. That makes you an irreplaceable asset.”
He made a fist, and the other officers nodded happily.
“Without supernatural help, the Austro-Hungarians would have lost by now. Their weapons aren’t any better than ours; their men, excepting their vampire officers, aren’t as good. We outnumber and out produce them twenty to one. Materially, their only chance is if we get so sick and tired of losing men that we call the whole thing off. And that’s not going to happen.”
He seemed awfully sure of that. But I guess he was right; the country wasn’t ready to quit. Neither was the Army, and for that matter, I guess we, the doggies, weren’t either.
“But we’re never going to win this war,” he continued, “until we cut the Enemy off from his sources of supply. The Man Downstairs needs the living up here to wage war on us. And the Austrians need the curses and spells from Below to even up the odds up here.”
“But cut them off from each other, and all the Devil can do is swear at us while we kill every one of his minions off the face of the Earth.”
He was talking directly to me now, his voice lower.
“Fact is, no matter what we do, he’s going to be doing that anyway. I think he’d keep cursing even if he won.”
He straightened up again, talking to the others.
“You’re too valuable to risk in combat, Sergeant. You’re going to be an instructor. I’ve got others like you, all I could beg, borrow, or steal. British, Americans, Germans. And others, plenty of them, who’ve never been Down There, but volunteered anyway for this specific mission. And when your unit is ready…you’re leading the way back to Hell.”
I scratched my stubble right in front of him. I hadn’t been exactly at attention, but now I leaned back on the center post. If I was too valuable to get killed, I was too valuable to court-martial, right?
“Aw, Hell, General,” I said, “I always knew that’s where we wuz going.”
* * * * *
It doesn’t say anything good about the human race that Hell is so crowded. But then, it may not be all our fault.
I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I have to explain some other things first. I’ll assume you know all about the demons, and the wizards who serve them, and the monsters they create together. It’s been that way for a long time, since the end of the First World War, as they’re calling it now. Every kid in short pants reading Doc Savage pulps knows how, in this new war, a rifleman covers a BAR man who covers a light machine gunner. And they also know a dead body is just so much inert mass, unless either a demon inhabits it or allows the soul that used to reside there to come back in. But of course, the demon wants a price for this real estate transaction, so the newly inhabited body craves blood.
There’s plenty more, but as I said, you already know it. Maybe a very young kid doesn’t, but then, he only needs to know that Hell is real. If our civilization is doing its job, he won’t need to know the ugly details until he’s older.
So far, so good. I’ve got nine patrols Down Below in my jacket, and I’ve never seen even one child in Hell. We can take pride in that. My first deep dive into Perdition (which isn’t a curse at all; it’s a technical term, so save your angry letters to the publisher), I saw dead souls, plenty of ‘em. Time and suffering had done a number on them all. And there were nonhuman things, too; demons of different shapes and sizes. It wasn’t as hopeless as some of the stories make it seem; when the demons came up into our world and started reanimating the evil dead, they looked to have an insurmountable advantage. I mean, you can’t kill what’s already dead, right? So all our killing technology was pretty much useless against vampires and the lesser monsters.
And for a while, they had it all their own way.
We humans have more in our own bag of tricks than killing tools, though. We’ve devised tools that lift, tools that cut, tools that burn, melt, and grind into a fine powder. Fact is, most of our effort and ingenuity isn’t spent on weapons, but things meant to shape the world more to our convenience. And by taking on forms of flesh, or even animated mass like the gnomes or dragons, the demons for the first time made themselves vulnerable to our machinery.
You break the rule that separates the material from the spirit, don’t be surprised if we material types return the favor. The dumb sons of the devil did it to themselves.
Did we go up against the supernatural with shovels and flashlights? That wouldn’t have been much good. But we know how to flatten the side of a mountain with explosives, then grind the chunks into gravel and melt asphalt over it into a flat, level plane. You’ve seen ‘em; they’re called highways.
A vampire, endowed with superhuman levels of strength, speed, resilience, and plasticity, still has trouble when it’s blown to bits, ground into paste, and mixed with mineral resin to harden into blocks. Probably the spirit locked into the mass spread through those blocks is hating us like a hurricane of spite, but that’s about all it can do when we’ve finished with its body.
Bodies let you touch the living, sure. But you’re stuck with it. We mortals don’t like how our bodies ache, tire, and break down. The demons were getting a crash course in all that. Then, too, for all the crowding I saw in my time Down Below, there do seem to be more of us up here in the sunlight than down there in the dark. We usually have the edge in numbers. The demons’ bodies do have all kinds of advantages, not being limited to what Our Father found sufficient to his plans. But one strong man can’t always beat a dozen weaker men; if he could, we wouldn’t have been able to take our continent from the Indians. Some of them were better at fighting than we’ll ever be.
But I was telling you why I don’t think the crowds in Hell are necessarily a black mark against mankind and the other Good Folk who share the world with us. Mind you, I don’t have any kind of a theory, not really. Just observations. Which began in Montana, but were mostly made in Poland in the spring and summer of ‘45.
Despair is the Enemy’s greatest weapon. And it comes to him naturally. He’s fighting an infinite Being, after all. He has no chance at victory.
Unless, of course, we the living give up on God and decide we’d better make our peace with the Devil. That way, at least, he hasn’t conquered God, but he’s beaten Man, which God would prefer he not do.
The Army knows about despair. To keep a man functioning usefully when he’s all but given up is the goal of all our training. To keep him going when he HAS given up…well, that’s beyond our power. Only the man himself can do that.
But as they say, “We can’t make you keep going. But we can certainly make you wish you had.”
I hear the Marines wash out about ten percent of those who join. Mind, this is out of the guys whom the Marines decided to accept in the first place, because they don’t take everyone. And every one of ‘em is a volunteer, so they’re self-selected before the start. And of those twice-chosen men, one out of ten can’t hack it.
The Airborne is about the same, according to the jumpmasters at Fort Bragg. The Rangers, on the other hand, wash out about half their recruits.
The Spiritual Scouting Force’s training was, as far as I can tell, at least as demanding as Ranger School.
Mountain climbing and plenty of it—Hell has mountains. I’ve seen ‘em. Field problems in pitch darkness—Hell is dark. Gas mask drill day and night, even working harder than most farmers. Because Hell’s air is hostile. Sudden eruptions of gunfire, flames, and smoke, at any moment, to get us used to surprises. Because there’s a lot about Hell we don’t know.
The one thing we didn’t deliberately do is practice operating on no food or sleep. Oh, it happened—we just didn’t set out to practice it on purpose. General Frederick saw to it that the Scouts ate well in camp. He even hired chefs to supervise the cooks, and I don’t know where he got choice beef in the middle of a world war, but we were encouraged to improvise. That example came straight from the top. And after all, it was cattle country…
Once we got into the mountains, though, we found Jeeps and mules couldn’t follow us up the slopes, so everything we ate had to be packed on our backs. The American way of war takes a ton of supplies, and with the possible exception of Private Gnorfank, nobody can man-pack that much.
(Yes, I know the word these days is “troll-pack,” but I’m using “man” in its general sense. Gnorfank was no worse than a lot of hundred-percent Sons of Adam I could name.)
So we sweated, and we starved, and we stayed alert with little sleep until it became normal. Anybody who had spent time in a Hooverville already knew about sweating and starving.
And sleep wasn’t the problem. The problem was dreams.
Remember, every one of us had been to Hell.
So really, it was kind of a blessing we didn’t get much sack time.
That was how you had to look at it.
Turns out, most of us who’d been to Hell described wildly different topography. Some thought it even changed depending on who was in it. Mountains never seemed to be in the same place, or even lean the same way, from day to day or even hour to hour, if you believed some of the more breathless reports.
So it didn’t seem likely we’d be able to keep large units of men together once we started advancing. The Army learned that in the First War, when big square regiments lost entire battalions in the woods.
We’d stripped down our organization, adding firepower to make up for fewer men, but Hell was going to be the most “closed terrain” ever. So the Scouts took it further.
Every unit needs an officer, goes the theory. In the regular Army, one lieutenant had about fifty men in his platoon. The Force, on the other hand, was organized into very small platoons, little more than what they called a squad in the First War. Fifteen men, at least three sergeants, and one lieutenant. But with plenty of automatic weapons, plenty of grenades, mortars, machine guns, bazookas, crosses, and Bibles, and holy water sprinklers, and all the other dirty tricks—maybe that should be clean tricks, but nothing’s clean in the field—we’d invented since 1918. We could have taken a First War platoon apart. Any man who could handle himself without supervision had the makings of a sergeant. Then we had to see if he could handle other men, to keep them moving forward when they wanted to go back or just lie down and die. Most of ‘em could do that once we got in practice.
So we had plenty of sergeants. A man who’d come back from Hell in one piece usually could carry that load. But we needed more lieutenants.
A lieutenant wears one bar as his badge of rank, gold or silver depending on how new he is. In the 35th Division, we’d called the bars “aiming stakes”, because lieutenants didn’t seem to last very long at the front. By the middle of ‘44, things got so bad they were commissioning officers right out of college, with a 90-day training course that mentioned everything and taught none of it. Twenty-one years old, never had a job or supervised anyone, and pow! Fifty men’s lives are in your hands.
Those guys evaporated even faster in combat. They weren’t going to be any use to the Force.
Frederick’s original concept was fifteen-man platoons, each man a corporal or sergeant, with both a lieutenant and a master sergeant (six stripes) or tech sergeant (five) in charge. That’s a lot of adult supervision for thirteen veteran troops, but he wanted the ability to split each team two, three, or more ways to undertake different tasks on the objective and know they’d find their way back after the fireworks. It’s how the Commandos did it, and like the Rangers, the Marine Raiders, the Pathfinders, Merrill’s Marauders, and any number of other special outfits, we were all just trying to outdo the Commandos at the game they’d pretty well invented.
Yes, I know, Rogers’ Rangers and Mosby’s Raiders predated the British glory boys by a lot. But the Brits were the first to use radio comms, motorized transport, light automatic weapons and portable high explosives to give Austro-Hungaro-Roumania’s King-and-Kaiser the shrieking daymares wherever they struck. Lexington and Concord were a long time ago; us Americans weren’t shy about copying a good idea from John Bull’s bully-boys.
But there weren’t nearly enough officers who tried out for the Force, and even fewer who passed the selection course. Frederick’s solution was elegant: commission a whole bunch of promising old sarges into second lieutenants. Start ‘em with a butter bar, to see if they can handle the rank. Promote ‘em to first, and eventually captain, if, when, and maybe.
Congress had another idea: no. An officer was a gentleman, after all, by act of Congress, although my bio teacher insisted that acts of congress were how all of us were made, no matter how humble. Be that as it may, they weren’t about to give up one of the few powers they still had in this war. No mass-produced instant lieutenants, not for the Spiritual Scouting Force.
So most of our platoons were commanded by sergeants, “until such time as an officer can be assigned.” An actual lieutenant got a company, at least. But we didn’t have hardly any of them; six captains and a major was it, at least until the Canadians joined us in November of ‘44. Frederick got a few promotions for his officers at the same time, so we had something like the right proportion of field-grades above the companies. But at company level, no lieutenants.
You have to have served, I think, to know why most of the guys were perfectly satisfied with this state of affairs.
Officers are supposed to live apart from the men, preserving the aura of infallibility that is central to command. Says so right here in the manual. But most of the Force’s commanders were like me, senior sergeants (or even junior ones) who impressed the Army enough to give them a swing at command. We had the job, if not the rank—were we supposed to act like officers, or like sergeants?
I’ve been told it’s difficult for former enlisted to act like officers and not like one of the guys. That’s supposed to be one of the greatest barriers to commissioning an enlisted man. Maybe it is. All I know is, in the Scouts we didn’t try.
Oh, I was in charge. I didn’t allow any question about that. But I didn’t pretend to be any kind of a superior being to my men. Where we were going, we were all going to be the same.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Simms?
I need direction in my prayer life, sir.
Uh…you may have read the name of this outfit a little too literally. We’re not looking for God. We’re looking for the other guys.
Well, I know where to find them, sir. (Finger to the chest, twice) Right here. That’s how come I got to get right with the Lord.
You know the Devil and his works, then?
Inside and out.
Then you’re who we’re looking for, Corporal.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Larzelere?
I hear we will kill many of the Hun. Zat is for me.
The Hun, huh?
What you call them, Jerry? Fritz? Ze Kraut? I want them all. I want to kill all the Boche I can. You will take me where I can kill ze Boche, then bon. I want in.
You know the Germans are our allies, right? The only Krauts we’re fighting are Austrians. That close enough for you?
Austrians, Bavarians—a Boche is a Boche. Zey will turn on you, ze Germans. I want to be there when they do.
Come the day, okay. I guess. But until we tell you…
I will kill Austrians. I see ze Germans, I will hate them in silence. Until ze day.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Martini?
I seen the future, Sergeant.
…And?
It’s bad!
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Gnorfank?
Everyone ‘ates me inna Army.
You think this outfit ‘ud be different?
Cawn’t be worse. And you got all sorts of Underworld types in here already, so I figure the odds are pretty good.
We don’t got any trolls in the Force, though.
S’why you need one. Y’see, a lotta times, the last fing you need’s a troll along. I know, I heard it all before. We eat too much, we smell, our skin rots the uniform, we scare kids an’ dogs an’ make the cows give sour milk. Yeah, orright, but that last fing comes up sooner or later, dun’it? An’ when it does, we’re like an ‘and grenade—when you need us, you really need us.
Us? You got a brother?
I’m about to bud, yeah. Be grown in a year or so. Two f’the price of one, hey?
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Marchoska?
I lust for the blood of the living.
How the heck did you get in here? How are you even standing in front of this crucifix?
No, I’m not…I ain’t a vampire. I just lust for the blood of the living. Listen, that’s not gonna be a problem, is it? ‘Cause the recruiter, he said you guys are going right into the mouth of Hell. So who’s gonna cry over a little blood-sipping?
I bet you could lead us all the way to Hell, Marchoska. No sale. I’m returning you to your unit…so I can find the guy that thought he could pass you off on the Force.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Pruitt?
Gonna look good for the girls when we win, ain’t I right? Glory outfit like you guys, I bet you put the King-n-Kaiser up against the wall with your own two hands. Just make sure there’s a photographer along, click-click! ‘Cause I’d look real good on the cover of Life.
Despair’s not an issue for you.
Despair’s for losers and sob sisters, Sarge. I ain’t neither one.
And it doesn’t bother you that we’re going to be in the worst places the Enemy has?
I’m a Lucky Man, baby! I’m a cinch to survive the war. I fall out a window, I’m gonna land in a pot o’ money.
Your tests didn’t show any Gifts besides dowsing.
Yeah, an’ a good thing, too, am I right? I know all them schmucks who were making a big noise with their Luck got snapped up in the Airborne once we got inta this thing. And where are they now, hah? Seems to me every time I see an Airborne division in the paper, it’s got a different number. 82nd, 101st, 17th, 19th…you use ‘em once an’ throw ‘em away, see? Like ballpoint pens.
No, those other schmos had the Luck, but they didn’t have the brains. I kept mine under wraps. An’ here I am, both feet on the ground.
You beat the test?
What test? You got a test for Luck now? I din’t take no Luck test.
It’s in there. We don’t like to tell people what we’re testing for.
Well, I guess I just slipped through the cracks. Huh. How ‘bout that. See? I really do have the Luck.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Grace?
I’m not sure it’s a good idea, us invading the Devil’s domain. But if we’re bound and determined to go, I think I could be useful down there. We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the invasion force, aren’t we?
Yeah.
I have good eyes and ears. I could probably keep some fellows out of Hell.
But…that’s the whole point! We’re going to Hell. On purpose.
But we’re not staying. I want to help us bring back as many men as we can.
Says here you’ve never been to Hell, but you have visions. Is that a typo? You have visions, plural, as in more than one?
I see Hell all the time, Sergeant. Whenever I want. You just have to get used to looking in another direction, that’s all. It’s sort of like death—you know you’re going to die, but you don’t think about it every moment. Living with Hell works the same way.
You can see Hell. Right now.
Sure.
What’s going on there?
Nothing good! What part are you interested in?
I don’t know. How many parts can you see?
All of ‘em. But, uh, if you want me to look at the bottom, I’d have to sort of work myself up to it. It’s pretty disturbing.
No, that’s all right. But…ALL of ‘em? Have you always been able to see it? Hell, I mean?
Since I came to America, Sergeant. It was harder before…
What? Harder before you came to America?
Yes.
America’s closer to Hell than Europe, is that it? Here I thought we were doing okay…
Oh, I’m not from Europe, Sarge. I never said I was.
Says here, first-generation American, European origin.
That’s not correct. Somebody must have misheard me, or made an assumption. Believe me, Sergeant, I don’t lie. I would never do that!
Okay, simmer down. I didn’t say you did. So where are you from? You don’t have an accent…
I’d rather not say.
Oh, so? Well, the stripes on my sleeve say different, Grace. Don’t forget, you’re in the Army now. So where you from?
Well, it’s like this. My home is very pleasant, but there are a lot of rules. My parents put me adrift when I was a boy, so I could grow up somewhere I could be free. The Graces found me and adopted me. They’re Norwegians, from Michigan, so maybe that’s why the Army thought I’m from Europe. But, then I guess you’ve heard all this before.
Sure. Superman in his rocket ship, from, uh, planet Krypton, wasn’t it?
Uh, I was thinking Moses, in his basket. Who’s Superman?
You gotta be kidding me now. You don’t know who Superman is?
I don’t go to the movies much, Sarge. Too much work to do.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, ah…Vtnzk? Vutunsk?
“Vatunska” is good. No Adam’s son can pronounch se vowels. Sank you.
(pause)
I vant…you know, is not just Spiritual Scouting Force. Anysing sat would end se war. I just hear you will try harder san anyvon else.
(pause)
You know, how kids, sey try to dig a hole to China?
Sure.
Vell, so I did. Ve dig, too, chust for fun. Dwarves, sure, ve dig all se time. But sis one time, I dig straight down, I don’t care what’s in front of me. Get se pick, mallet, se big maul, and go tru it. Whatever it is. So I break tru sis underground room. And I follow it. And under se floor, I break up se floor, and sere I see it.
(pause)
It isn’t China. And now se voices won’t let me sleep.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Lodge?
Well, sir. My boys an’ me, we done killed off all the ghosts an’ monsters in the county. An’ the other counties, their sheriffs won’t pay us for ghost killin’, least not what you’d call eatin’ money. Thing about ghost huntin’ is, you cain’t eat what you kill. So this here is the only outfit says they’ll pay me for the only thing I’m good at.
We don’t pay extra for killing monsters. It goes with the job. Sometimes you get medals, I guess.
Well, medals are good, too. An’ I can send the money home to my wife.
Why do you want to join the spiritual scouting force, Higgins?
They said it was that or the chair.
Men kept coming in. We started with conditioning hikes and obstacle courses, then moved into mountain training on the Canadian border. We took a train to North Carolina for parachute school, but by the time we got back, we had over a hundred men who’d missed jump training. Frederick got some cargo planes and ‘chutes and staged his own jump school, right there in Montana. By the time we were shipped out, we’d run about a thousand guys through their practice and qualification jumps. Two broken legs, one broken neck. As good as the Airborne.
The new combat jackets were nifty items, thick and waterproof with a blanket-like lining and elastic at the wrist to keep water from getting up your sleeves. Originally they were a khaki that faded to light tan—this was when we were in Spain, which in winter also fades to a light tan—and then they started issuing a green version, which started off dark olive but faded in the sun and rain to a sort of light mossy color.
So if we fought in dappled mossy glens, we were in high cotton. Anyplace else, and we sort of stood out. There were two kinds of trousers, prewar brown and new-style green, but they both contrasted sharply with the jackets, so the eye just naturally picked out the straight line where they met.
The Marines had planned to outfit their boys in patchwork camouflage from head to toe. As it worked out, that couldn’t be done right away, so they settled for helmet covers that were two kinds of brown with some brown-green thrown in. If you were taking proper cover, that’s about all the Sea Folk were going to see of you anyway: the top of your helmet. They said it saved lives.
The Force got hold—I can’t tell you where, because I don’t know and didn’t ask—of some of those Marine helmet covers. In the woods behind Fort Harrison, Montana, they worked a treat. When there was snow, we dappled a little white paint on ‘em, although it stubbornly refused to come off when spring came.
If my recent trip to Hell was any guide, we’d do better to dress in brick-red with orange slashes, but that wasn’t going to be a very good idea in central Europe. Maybe if we stormed a brick factory which was also on fire—it could definitely happen.
So Frederick requisitioned two thousand bodysuits in green camouflage. Our country had turned twelve million men into soldiers, built thousands of ships, tens of thousands of huge complicated airplanes, and kept them all fed for years on end. You would think we could splash dye on a few boiler suits.
Maybe, if it were the most important task in the entire war, we could have. But apparently it wasn’t.
So we took the one-piece clothes we were issued and daubed them with black and brown paint. There was a lot of tar in the black—it was originally for roofing purposes—and the brown was grainy and stiff, like old mud. Once it was on, that paint wasn’t coming off.
And after we washed it a few times, the paint splotches got all ragged at the edges, which mimicked nature even better. You could look right at a man in the brush and not make out his shape.
And yes, our enemy preferred to fight at night, which sort of defeated the purpose of camouflage. But it didn’t hurt.
Half of us in the line platoons had Thompson submachine guns, or the new “grease gun” cheapies that shot the same round but weren’t very good otherwise. The other half got rifles, plus two BARs to a platoon and a light machine gun for each company. Carbines for the officers and senior sergeants, although some of us declined. There were automatic carbines now, which switched at will from single-shot to full auto. We knew about them, and one or two may have found their way into our grasping hands, but we certainly weren’t issued any.
That’s just line platoons, mind. Weapons platoon had more machine guns, mortars, and bazookas. They wouldn’t be bothered to haul around anything as piddling as a BAR.
Three platoons, plus Weapons, made up Dog Company. No, we’re not werewolves; that’s just how the Army pronounces the letter “D.” It’s hard to tell most letters apart over a radio under less-than-perfect conditions; over half the letters end with the “ee” sound, for instance. So the Army gave each letter a short word that didn’t sound like any other letter’s short word. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog.
Our captain, Mr. Dragan, got hit digging in on a hill near Radom, before the counterattack that drove the Ivans back across the Vistula. An air-dragon suddenly went into convulsions as it flared for landing; it flipped over, flailed its neck and tail in random directions, and faceplanted into the soil about fifty yards away.
We found out later the dragon’s bones had shattered, all at the same time. Air-dragons are prone to stress fractures, on account of the hollow bones, but the odds of so many at once were, well, I’d call it miraculous if it weren’t so clearly the work of the Other Side. The Russians, unlike the Austrians, didn’t release crowds of imps and spirits to mess with every aspect of our lives. They saved up their curses and let ‘em go all in a bunch, to make a difference.
They sure made a difference on this flyboy’s mount. Dragons have scales, which sprayed everywhere on impact, and some of the teeth hit the Captain in the side and legs. Grace said he saw a piece of scale make a mid-air turn to miss Pruitt and whack the Captain’s helmet, but I didn’t know whether to take that as gospel or what.
Anyhow, that’s the farthest bite I ever saw a dragon make. And doubly ironic, because that’s what “Dragan” means in Ukrainian, I heard. Dragon.
He’d be back, probably, but not any time soon. Once again, I had a company.
* * * * *
D Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Spiritual Scouting Force
Table of Organization, 10 July 1945 COMPANY HEADQUARTERS
Murphy, M. 1st Lt. Zwergbaum, D. T/Sgt. Pruitt, D. Lucky man Martini, S. Seer
Higgins, P. Radio Operator Larzelere, C. Company Clerk Grace, C. Medic
Gnorfank, NFN Stretcher Bearer Simms, H. Deacon’s Asst.
Chen, K. Cook Vatunska, X Scout Lodge, P. Scout/Sniper Rivoli, C. Driver Leuders, D. Driver Loftus, B. Driver FIRST PLT
Sumner, J. Sgt. Burghoff, R. Illston, P. Cleveland, M. Niepogodzinski, T. Burgess, M.
Kelly, J. Morris, J. Davalos, R. Lopez, P. Troupe, T. Stanton, H. Atkinson, R.
SECOND PLT
Lesser, L. S/Sgt. Savalas, G. Alberty, K.
Von Kugel, H. Morin, A. Malanga, R. Ward, S. Rivera, K. Cassidy, J. Pine, A. Keltch, H. Brasky, T. Lucas, T.
THIRD PLT
Baker, J. T/Sgt. Higgins, J. Giambalvo, T. Lawson, J.
Kendall, L. Smith, D. Thibodeaux, M. Knights, H. Canady, T. Amory, M. Malanga, M. Land, C. Heavey, K.
WEAPONS PLT
Clancy, B. Sgt. Sanders, T. McBride, J. Lambert, M. Bell, S. Wright, P. Goodner, A. Stewart, S. Hill, M. Thurman, T. Johnson, S.
Sabol-Johnson, C. Smith, A.
You might be wondering where all the German and French names are. It’s true that by early 1945, the German and French armies were pretty worn out. Their countries had been occupied for years, and what was left of their armies had been completely re-equipped by the U.S. They put some blue dye in the uniforms given to the French, and some gray in the German, but from any distance they looked like any other G.I.s.
Foreign weapons? Well, every American unit picks stuff up here and there. It’s not uncommon for a guy in every squad to be carrying around a Schmeisser burp gun or one of those German machine rifles in addition to the weapon he was issued.
So I ended up in a forest in Poland, freezing my ears off, bargaining with a panicked vampire in the dark while hungry dogs prowled around sniffing for my blood.
Maybe you haven’t got all the details leading up to that—the headlines are still about the Alpine campaign and the war in the Pacific. So here’s the Reader’s Digest version:
The First Spiritual Scouting Force had trained and trained until we were all really good at everything a soldier does. We were supposed to enter Hell first, locate the enemy and the terrain, and guide the main body of the invasion force to where they could do the most good.
We weren’t ready to invade yet. The time wasn’t right, what with half the Earth in the hands of the Enemy, but also, our methods of transport needed work.
Soldiers often said, “See you in Hell.” We figured, yes, we’re fighting for our country, our loved ones, and all that, but except for a very few, we don’t feel good about it. We (again, most of us) felt like we were already damned, just by coming Over Here to kill our fellow man.
The vampires, on the other hand, no one feels terribly guilty about.
So one way to access the Enemy’s stronghold is to die, with plenty of sins to weigh you down, and just go where the corpse-winds take you. We’ve got enough first-person accounts to know that isn’t any way to mount an invasion; everyone who goes Down There ends up in a completely different, although always awful, place. We’d end up scattered all over Hell’s half-acre, literally.
The Rangers had this scheme whereby a very bad soldier, usually a murderer, but otherwise obedient to authority, was supposed to crouch in the front of a Higgins boat with 30 other less-sinful men crowded behind him. The sinner steered, pulling on a rudder as he felt his sins pull him this way and that, and the rest of the guys were just along for the ride.
I’d like to think we didn’t actually launch thirty men into Hell following the sins of a murderer; we’re not that desperate yet to win this war. But it could have happened.
Those few of us part-Elvish fellows who could stand the gaff could, of course, lead our armies into Hell and even come back to report. But getting there required the same events: Sin, followed by Death. We weren’t exactly swamped with volunteers.
Lacking any better ideas, we were told to wait for said better ideas to emerge. If something, literally God knows what, came up unexpectedly, so that we had to invade Hell right now, well, then, the Fair Folk would lead the way, as it had in times of legend.
You know what most of the heroes of legend have in common?
They’re dead.
But we hadn’t had an opportunity to test any of these bright notions yet, because the war situation had gone from Horror, past Terror, to Right Out Of Its Mind.
It seems that the Austro-Hungaro-Roumanians didn’t like their chances the way the war was going. In the First War, they made a pact with the Devil rather than face defeat. This time, they already had the Devil in their corner, sort of; that wasn’t available as a desperation option. So they went for the next closest thing: Stalin.
Russia, in its current guise as the USSR, had been our forthright ally against the forces of the Dark. And then, as near as we can figure out, the Austros reached out to Stalin, offering immortality, victory, and for all we knew, fellowship with a kindred spirit.
Communists are supposed to be above temptation, but Stalin received the King-and-Kaiser’s envoys. They huddled in the Kremlin for a couple of weeks. Then he stopped coming out in the daytime. Then his chief ministers did, too.
And then, suddenly, the Soviet Union with its hundred million inhabitants pulled out of the Alliance, changed sides, and began shelling its former co-belligerents, including, of course, us.
* * *
In a single day, Stalin’s about-face pretty much tripled the numbers against us, and multiplied the land area by about twelve times, because Russia’s really big. And the Soviet Union isn’t just Russia, either; they’ve got just about a third of Asia as well.
Land doesn’t win wars, though. If we ever decided we needed to occupy the whole USSR, well, then, maybe land would win a war after all. What was it that Navy guy said about Russia: too big to occupy and too big to ignore? Well, we weren’t in a position to try either one. All we could do in the long run would be to wall them up and wait them out. But in the short term, we couldn’t even do that.
The Red Army stopped pressing into Roumania and started heading northwest, generally in the direction of Poland and Berlin. Which had been a quiet sector before the big switch. Heck, it wasn’t even part of the front lines. Poland was on our side, and so was Russia, so why patrol a border that changed hands so often no one could agree on where it was?
Alarm bells rang off their pedestals. Lots of specialists in, well, everything that wasn’t Infantry, Armor, or Artillery got handed brand-new rifles and told to report to the front, yesterday at the latest. Training rotations were called off, and their men were hastily shoved into the line. Uncle Sam called in all his favors with the Old Folk, elf, dwarf or Other.
Everybody, but everybody, who wasn’t in actual combat got shifted to the new Russian Front with a desperate swiftness. A lot of our best combat outfits were unlucky enough to also be the most mobile, so they got to meet Ivan first. All six Airborne divisions, ours and what was left of the British after Market Garden, dropped into the path of a hundred Russian divisions.
Most of what we had was committed to the Austrian Alps already: the paratroops, clerks, cooks, deacons, and truck drivers manned a scratch line from Riga to the Carpathians, stood their ground, got engulfed, and died. But they bought time to fly in units in training or rebuilding from all over the States, including the Scouts. The Marines in the Pacific were going to have to handle the Sea People by themselves, along of course with our gallant Japanese allies; no more men were going East until we’d stopped the Red steamroller in Europe.
As for us, our scouting role wasn’t going to be very difficult; the enemy was right there and headed this way. And at least we had maps, actual maps, of Poland, that didn’t require an advanced degree in murder and rebellion to read.
That was then. This was now, the height of June in Eastern Europe, and hotter than Manhattan in August. How do they manage to have such horrific winters and then bake the land to brick in the summer? Doesn’t make sense to me.
But then, that’s this war for you.
The Reds were coming straight at Berlin. In the way were the Germans, the Poles, the French, the British, and about a third of the U.S. Army, Europe. Our little corner of the Army was facing the Russians somewhere in southeastern Poland, but north of us, they were over the Oder River into German territory. Naturally, our German allies were more interested in their own soil than our American butts. So we were on our own.
Still, Third, Ninth, and Second British Armies put together was about twenty divisions, give or take. I’d heard the Reds had four hundred divisions, but I’d also heard one of ours was worth four or five of theirs. The guy who said that seemed like it gave him confidence. Maybe he wasn’t big on math.
The Soviet Army couldn’t get an offensive going all along the front; maybe they were still figuring out the transition to an officer corps entirely composed of the Un-dead. Their daylight attacks had been pretty sad efforts, honestly. A horde of brown uniforms comes running at one sector of the line, with no support on either flank, and every gun for miles around cuts them to pieces. A week later, another horde attacks in another place. Rinse and repeat.
But now it was night, and the enemy was starting to get organized.
Yes, it was wartime, and it was cool, even cold, at night. But we had a fire, we had trenches, there was plenty to eat and for once, we’d had a few straight days without rain, so everyone’s socks were dry.
It was darn near pastoral, that night on the Line.
Pruitt was playing cards with himself, and cheating. Even after Fort Harrison and a few weeks of actual combat, he was still this peppery little dowser and lucky man from Pittsburgh, always acting like he knew better than everyone else. Which, come to think of it, was his whole job.
Martini was brushing his teeth with the lemonade powder from a K-ration pack. I guess they were pretty dirty. Lodge was reading a Bible, angling it forward to catch the firelight, and Simms had his BAR apart on a towel, wiping oil from the working parts.
Grace stretched out his legs alongside the fire and gave a most unsoldierly sigh. But nobody ribbed him about it. I guess most of us felt the same way.
Then he raised one boot, stretching his leg till it was almost sticking straight up. Okay, that was a little odd, but guys work out their stiffness all kinds of ways.
By the look on his face, though, Grace didn’t think it was all that usual, either.
He tried to sit up, but his leg stayed straight up in the air like it was nailed there. Then he pushed off with his hands and climbed to his feet.
Only his feet didn’t come down to where the rest of him was. He climbed up beside them instead, standing firm on both feet, about three feet off the ground.
“Hey, Grace, what’re ya doing?” said Dave. “You tired of us?”
“I don’t know,” Grace replied. “I’m not doing it on purpose…”
He looked down in puzzlement, because he was getting further away by the second. He didn’t rise straight, like in an elevator, but sort of swayed this way and that, more like he was in a balloon, or being hoisted on a rope rig.
Pruitt jumped up and grabbed hold of Grace’s ankle.
“Come back here, ya apple-knocker! If I gotta stay, you gotta stay, too!” he said.
Pruitt’s feet left the ground for a moment, before he promptly let go.
“Hey!” he said, outraged. Then his face cleared.
“Kid,” he said quickly. “You got enough oomph to take me with ya? Hang on!”
He grabbed hold again, but Grace was a solid two hundred pounds, and Pruitt, as I may have mentioned, was a scrappy little terrier of a guy. He hung from Grace’s leg for a moment, but his arms gave out and he fell, again. This time he fell far enough to collapse in a heap.
“Sergeant Murphy?” Grace said. “Sir, this is not my idea! I’m not trying to desert.”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” I insisted. “What can we do, Grace? What’s happening?”
Grace was too high to grab him now, though Pruitt was trying. “Go on, Grace!” Simms shouted. “Get on outta this meatgrinder, dammit!”
Grace looked down, his face stricken.
“Why would you damn me, Eric?” he said to Simms. “What have I ever done to you?”
“Aw, hell, Grace, I didn’t mean it like that,” Simms sputtered, but he was still game. “But listen! If you can get outta here, you better get goin’ while you can. Ain’t none of us comin’ back from this war—”
“I’d think again before I said what you just said, Simms,” Lodge put in. Yes, the guys from the other end of the position were over here now, too.
“Seems to me we got the forces of the Devil not quite on the run, exactly,” Lodge mused, “but run to ground. We got ‘im penned up and before long, we’re gonna start thinning his ranks out a little. Then a little more. We’re gonna win, Simms. If God’s with us, who’s gonna stop us?”
I wondered who was standing guard…yes, there was Martini, goggling up at Grace like he was seeing…well, something pretty amazing, I guess.
But I still saw Gnorfank at the edge of the trees, staring resolutely away from the scene unfolding around us. Good for him.
Grace had dipped some, and Pruitt got hold of the toe of his boot. “Gotcha!” Pruitt said. “Hang on, kid, we’re both gettin’ out.” Grace swayed downward, swooping to the right as he did so. “Donald, we can’t let our country down,” Grace said sorrowfully.
“Don’t be a deserter.”
“I’m not! Listen, you can’t help floatin’ away, can ya? Well, neither can I!”
“That doesn’t make sense…” Grace insisted.
“Dammit, kid, I’m tryin’ to help ya!” Pruitt said. Grace was swaying again, and Pruitt seemed powerless to check his swings, as though he, Pruitt, weighed nothing at all.
Grace dropped an arm’s length and Pruitt sat down, hard. But he didn’t let go.
“Donald, don’t damn me,” Grace ground out. This time he wasn’t pleading, he was telling.
“That’s it, Grace!” Dave shouted suddenly. “Pruitt’s got the right idea. You’re getting too good for this world, see? You gotta cuss us…come on, cuss up a storm! Turn the air blue around here!”
“It’s against regulations, Sgt. Zwergbaum,” Grace said solemnly.
“Oh, yeah? Well, so’s desertion,” Dave replied. “If you gotta break a little rule to keep from breakin’ a big one, then that’s what you do. Hell, ain’t that why it’s okay to kill the enemy, when killing’s such a big deal?”
Grace floated higher as Dave’s moral reasoning took hold. “Damn you anyway, kid!” Pruitt spat. “Get back down here!” But this time Grace didn’t flinch, nor drop.
“I’m not damned, Donald,” he told Pruitt.
Now he was as high as the top of an apple tree, drifting out of the woods toward the open fields. “And you don’t get to damn me anyway,” he said to Pruitt. Then, with a great effort, he said, “You jerk.”
Grace seemed to lose a little buoyancy. He wobbled. “That’s it, kid!” Pruitt cried. “I’m a jerk, an’ worse!” Well, he said a joik and woise, but he meant it anyway.
“He’s a lot of other things, too, Grace,” Dave reminded him. “You been in the Army a while—you gotta know the words.”
“But I don’t…I didn’t mean to condemn you, Donald,” said Grace, and he was slipping away into the sky again.
“Private Grace!” I snapped, bouncing my voice off the trees. He looked down, just about straight down, and so help me, tried to come to attention in the middle of the empty air.
“I am your commanding officer, and I am ordering you to curse, effective immediately,” I said sharply. “If it’s a sin, let it be on my head. Your duty is to obey!”
A chaplain would have said, “It’s your duty to obey, isn’t it?” Teachers talked like that, too. But you can’t give an order as a question. We’re not made that way.
“Yessir,” he said, blushing furiously. Then he looked upward. “Oh, God,” he said. He wasn’t cursing; from his tone, he was asking for clarification.
“I don’t want to go,” he continued. “Not yet. My buddies haven’t won the war yet, and I’m afraid some of them might get killed. If they get killed now, in this Army, surrounded by all this…they’re not going to make it to Heaven, I’m afraid.”
He was stock-still now, maybe ten yards from the ground.
“I don’t want to go,” he repeated. “I won’t go. And if you try to make me go…then darn your master plan, anyway.”
He wavered in the air, wobbling from side to side. “Darn it, and darn you. Darn you to HECK!”
He fell.
None of us were under him; nobody’d thought that far ahead. But right before he hit, a massive arm took him at the waist and swung him, so his downward speed turned into a swoop that landed him on his feet. Grace wobbled, then toppled over on his butt.
Gnorfank seized his neck from the back, thought about lifting him back to his feet, gave him an experimental shake, then let him go. “E’s no’ready te stand jus’yet, Mr. Murphy-sir,” Gnorfank rumbled. “Bu’ seems t’me ee’ll be right in a bit.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on guard, Gnorfank?”
He gave me an elaborate yellow-eyed wink that should have turned his face inside-out.
“Oo sez I’m not?” he said, and turned his back, hastening back to his post.
Grace shook his boot with both hands, then put his hands on the dirt. He started to stand up.
“Grace?” I said.
“Okay,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “I’ll be okay, Sergeant. Like you said, our portion is obedience.”
“Cheer up, kid,” Pruitt told him. “He knows you didn’t mean it.” Grace turned to face him, his face long and somber.
“But I did, Donald,” he said. “I did. I don’t care if it’s part of the Plan, I want to see this thing through with you guys.”
He took a step, testing, then jumped. He came back down just like a regular guy.
“I meant it,” he said to no one in particular. “So I’m good from here on in. I’m not going anywhere.”
* * * * *
We weren’t on the main line of resistance; we were in front of it. We’d been roaming around locating enemy assets until the vehicles gave up the ghost, so to speak.
Now our radius of action was shorter, but on the other hand, we were a whole lot sneakier. Yes, I know. It’s hard to move a whole platoon without making some noise. But nobody ever snuck up on the enemy driving a column of deuce-and-a-halfs.
Artillery popped between the lines. It was ours; Ivan doesn’t seem to have a lot of guns, or shells, either. We Americans have plenty of shells, and both shells and guns are so hammer-simple they’re no fun for gremlins. So we shoot a shell into enemy territory every few minutes, all night long, to keep their heads down. In the First War, it was meant to keep the enemy from sleeping; these days, they don’t sleep at night, but it is the only time they move around. If they’re up out of their trenches, the shelling will keep them flinching, maybe keep them from moving at all. So goes the theory.
I don’t think the guy who came up with said theory ever saw a vampire-led army; the snuffies carrying rifles may very well want to hesitate, flinch, and hide, but they aren’t going to do any of those things as long as their officer’s around. One, vampires have mesmeric powers, which get stronger the longer they’re around you. Once a Strudel private has been in the same outfit for a month or so, he’s broken to the leash like a good hound dog.
The other reason, of course, is that he’s scared to literal quivering death of his officer, and he’s right to be so. Every night, someone in the company is being bitten, officer’s discretion. No one wants to be the C.O.’s midnight snack.
I was up with Second Platoon, checking things out. Not that I can see better at night than anyone else; the book says you’re supposed to make sure the guys aren’t doping off when they should be alert.
That really isn’t the problem in the Force. Every man is a volunteer; they used to say about Caesar that his men would follow him to Hell, but with us, that’s actually the mission statement.
Thing is, if a man is willing to volunteer and has the special skills we need, there isn’t a lot else that would disqualify him from the Force at first. He has to pass the training, and there’s a by-our-Lady lot of it, but a history of trouble in the Army, or in civilian life, isn’t so much of an issue.
So I wasn’t going to catch anyone sleeping or carrying a rusted weapon. But they would be holding dice games, or chewing tobacco which the vamps can smell almost as well as blood, or fiddling with their rosaries instead of watching the night in front of them. And a lot of them were sneakier than I was, so catching them was another kind of crapshoot.
I had Higgins, the murderer, with me, the heavy field radio on his back. Something flickered in the light of a shellburst, about two hundred yards away. Poland’s kind of flat, and after a week of even casual shellfire there aren’t a whole lot of trees left, so two hundred yards was pretty close. Had the enemy snuck someone up within charging distance of our lines? Or were they coming up out of the ground, or materializing out of mist like they did?
Or was I just seeing things? “Higgins,” I decided. “Get me Savaldi. Let’s get some flares on that field.”
So help me, the radio handset spit in his ear. He jerked it back, and a jeering tongue flickered at him, before the little brown gremlin slithered down the coil and back into the radio backpack.
He yanked it open, hit it with the Saint Elmo, and furry bodies scattered in several directions. What was left had been pretty thoroughly chewed to twinkling strips. Gremlins squeeze through tiny gaps, sure, but how they’d gotten that many of their number into the radio case was a mystery to me.
“Why do we even issue these things?” I asked. Higgins didn’t know, either.
The only crystal ball was with Martini back at the CP. It was more of a spyglass than a radio, although he could tune in other seers most of the time. I didn’t know if Savaldi with the weapons platoon had any way to read a crystal transmission, but it was my only option now. Unless I wanted to just admit it was still 1918 and send a runner.
I was selecting a runner from the guys I could see when the grass heaved up in front of us.
Somehow, someone had crawled through the dirt, under the dirt, just below the grass, and bumped up against our foxholes, then stood up. A lot of someones.
I shot a lot and Higgins shot a lot. We both had automatic weapons, although his was an M3 grease gun and mine was a bad-ass Thompson. We saw night sky through the chests of three of the men in front of our holes.
None of them so much as flapped an arm. They did fall over backward nice and stiff, though.
Meanwhile, the other six or seven yanked their weapons out of the dirt and came up into the hole with us. Higgins was out of that hole like a cork out of a bottle, but I didn’t make up my mind fast enough, and they were right in my face, soaking up my muzzle flashes like beach sunshine. They hadn’t dragged any guns through the soil; I imagine it would have played hell with reliability. But they did have a much older solution to the problem of noisy neighbors wearing the wrong uniform. Swords.
Modern swords aren’t a lot different from their grandpappies’. One dead guy had brought a little too much sword, though; he swung before he cleared the last few inches out of the dirt, and it sort of jerked him to a halt. He looked shocked, then positively embarrassed as I hosed him down with a long burst.
Holes appeared in his uniform, which was now mud-brown whether or not it had started that way. But as soon as he was down, he was right back up. His healing magic was so strong the burned cloth around his wounds turned back to brown; he grinned, and his teeth were beet-red.
Okay, so he’d guzzled all the blood he could hold before heading out on his errands. We stagger under the weight of our ammo and grenades, so I knew how he felt. I didn’t want to, though. Was I going to run out of ammo before he ran out of blood?
As it turned out, no. I didn’t.
Vampires don’t have weak spots, as such—everything can heal if they have enough blood. But although it doesn’t beat, the heart is still the crossroads of his blood supply. Punch a hole in it and half the blood he sends to fix his limbs gets wasted along the way. It slows down the healing process, which allows me to establish a commanding lead with the hurting process.
Once he was down, clawing at his chest, I could grip the Thompson’s fore end and hammer a whole burst into his head. Again, it’ll heal, but he won’t be making any sophisticated command decisions until it does. And maybe before he wakes up, his blood supply will tap empty.
Yes, we’ve pretty much got vampire-hunting down to a science up here on the Line, or out in front of it. Dealing with a whole squad of them, though, is very much a matter of art rather than science.
I never did too well in art. So Ivan Longsword went down, and stayed down, but his cousin Ivan was holding a hatchet in each hand and came after me as soon as the first Ivan was out of the way. This is while Ivan, their uncle’s nephew on his mother’s side, was screwing together the pieces of a hellacious long spear and circling to Ivan’s left, the better to stick it in my tender hide.
They were grouped—a mistake. But they aren’t grenade bait when you’re the center of their bunching-up.
I swept the spitting muzzle over both of them to buy some time, backing out of the hole by touch. Then I needed my left hand to reload, and although Ivan the Hatchet was still getting over my rude departure, Ivan the Spear was ignoring the bullets I had donated to him. Or, just possibly, I’d missed him altogether.
Thunk, went the spear point into my arm. Scrape, went the edges across the bones inside. Poke, went the spear point through my shirt and into a rib.
I didn’t drop the Thompson, but I did forget about the magazine. I have no memory of where it fell. Sometimes I don’t even notice a wound, but most of the time I get distinctly stupid when hurt. This might be shaping up to be one of those times.
He was out of reach if I wanted to brain him with the gun, which I very much did. Then he yanked back on the spear, and that hurt, too.
I was now free to move, so I ducked a sword thrust, parried an axe swing with my Thompson, looked down for my magazine and fell down as my knees went soft under me. Thinking back on it now, I should have taken another mag from the pouch on my chest rig; that’s pretty much what they’re there for. But I wasn’t marinating in the luxury of time to reflect, right at that moment.
I was in the dirt. I felt around for the fallen mag, crabbing around with three limbs to avoid being a helpless target. I felt the spear punch into my ribs again. The upper ones this time.
And then…I couldn’t tell you how it feels to die, because I never remember the moments right beforehand. All I know is I was flat on my face again, spitting out wet ashes, soaking in briny tears while the infants howled.
It was daytime in the land of the dead; the sky was sooty red instead of dirty black. Far away, downslope, something snarled in pain and clashed huge teeth together.
I’ve heard it said that the soul and the body are separate things. When I fall, though, all of me falls together. I wore dirty canvas and stinking socks, carried an assault pack over my shoulders, scratched a young beard when I felt my face for wounds. And my helmet was right over there.
The first time I was here, I spent a long time looking around in disbelief. This time, I wasn’t planning on staying.
I got up out of the ashes. They had a clean tang to them compared to the mud we’d been living in Up There. I didn’t have a lot of spit to clean my mouth, so I ran a finger along my gums and lips. Time was, I’d have wiped it on my shirt first.
There was movement all around me. Around and between the ashy lumps of discolored brass, which were said to contain the souls of virtuous pagans, things were stirring. Maybe they’d been lying doggo, waiting for something juicy to stumble by. Or maybe they’d just formed out of non-existence, and by sheer dumb luck they were right close to me.
Anyway, there were several things under the ashes. Most seemed dog-sized, or smaller. One area that was heaving and collapsing like a tent in the wind was bigger.
A hog, an ordinary hog, burst out of the ground. Okay, so it had teeth instead of bristles, but it was still comfortingly Earthlike, until it turned to run away, and I saw the second head underneath its buttocks. Upside-down, it didn’t look human, but I knew better. Animals don’t go to Hell.
In fact, that was the cue for everything in the area to take to its heels, or whatever it had. Brick-colored forms hopped, flopped, and scampered away from me, or more accurately, away from the biggest thing in the region. That wasn’t me.
The heaving area reached the surface. Ashes curled and blew away. A long, spear-headed white worm swayed up out of the earth, flapping its rags at me. It uncurled a tentacle like a garden hose lined with teeth, ending in something like a fat leaf curled in at the sides. The end of it was a little like a tongue, which it wagged at me.
It beckoned with its swaying hand.
“Come,” it said, gurgling up from deep down beneath. I didn’t see any legs; no telling how far it extended into the dirt.
But I didn’t have any business in Hell right now. Later, well, I try to remain hopeful, although if God is just, I’m going to have some explaining to do. And if He ain’t, well, that’d be even worse, wouldn’t it?
Getting stabbed had rung my bell pretty solid. I wasn’t up to this sort of thinking, even if I had the inclination. For example, with all the strange characteristics this denizen of Hell possessed, I named him Curly. Because he curled. Where does that fall on the IQ scale?
So I showed Curly my Thompson, and he kept on waving and wagging. Of course, there wasn’t a magazine in it, so I fed it one and pointed it. No reaction.
A lot of these things down here are seriously ancient; maybe Curly didn’t even know what a gun was. You figure, the angels were around a long time before Hell, and then Hell was around a long time before Adam. And considering how many people there are in the world right now, vampire efforts to the contrary, it has to have been a colossally long time since this fellow first looked around and gave his first wail of despair. Whereas the Thompson trench-clearing submachine gun was invented just one world war ago.
Do I know the score of the game the Dodgers played this afternoon? No, I don’t. For this guy, gunpowder was probably even more recent than that. So I shot his pointy head a few times, and it sort of fell apart like a pumpkin. Nothing much inside but smoky oil.
That got his attention. Curly swayed closer, without moving from the spot where he came out of the ground. Sure enough, there was a lot more to him underneath.
I started walking, then, but he had my attention, too. My next burst was just a two-shot flick of the trigger finger; sometimes I can do just one, but today wasn’t my best day.
This one made him flinch. He jerked back into the ground, scraping off his arms in the process. They sort of folded against his trunk, like broken cornstalks, I guess. I’ve seen cornfields in the movies.
I snapped out my magazine and thumbed the rounds out, one by one. Two, three, four, and silver. Our usual loadout is four lead bullets to every silver; it’s all Uncle Sam can afford, over however many millions of bullets we use. This time, the second bullet I shot him with had been ten bucks of Colorado poison to his kind.
He didn’t come back. I turned around.
I stalked up the slope of death, hearing the wails and the croaking threats, burning my feet and scraping my hands and elbows on gritty sand. In places I had to crawl, others I had to climb, digging for footholds with the toes of my boots.
I had one special magazine stuffed in a thigh pocket and I switched it out, leaving a few .45-caliber rounds in a 20-round stick on the floor of Hell. Which was wasteful, and a little later I regretted it. But you do things like that in combat.
Then I was up into the smoke, hard bone under my boots, and I kept going with my eyes screwed shut against the smoke-sting until I broke out into the relative quiet of the Polish night. Back among the living.
Mostly.
* * * * *
Higgins was gone, although his radio was still here. There was a hatchet laying in the dirt, but no people or ex-people.
There were a lot of things I should have been doing which I was not. Looking after my men, first of all; they needed to know there were attackers coming up from underground. The gunfire would have told them the first part, but did they know it was moles?
However, that wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, the real first-of-all. Because we, my men and I, were out here for a reason: to warn the doggies on the Main Line of Resistance, a long walk westward, of enemy activity out in front. Which this definitely was.
They, like the rest of the Scouts, would have heard shooting, but there’s always some of that at night. Our unit’s mission was to report back who, what, and where, and I hadn’t done that.
Fortunately, in the absence of a radio, both duties lay in the same direction: west. I crept low to the ground and followed the Russians.
An imp fluttered past, giving me a wide berth. I crossed myself, then crossed myself again. Back in the Alps, we saw the little bastards every night; Strudels used ‘em as messengers, where they couldn’t trust a runner not to hotfoot over to our side. But on the Russian Front, the Soviets had only joined the Enemy a month ago. There hadn’t been time for them to deploy imps, dwarves, trolls, and all the rest of the panoply of twentieth-century warfare. Matter of fact, this was the first one I’d seen.
So this one was important. And it was heading east, away from our lines and back to where an ungodly horde of Russians waited.
They knew where the Line was now. As soon as that imp reported back…well, an air raid would be about the best we could expect. More likely artillery, although Ivan seemed light in that department. Or maybe another squad of tunneling vampires.
These right here, however, hadn’t gone back into the soil. I spotted an abandoned broadsword and an orphaned M-1 rifle before I got my eyes on the vampires, right where my command post shared space with the 36th Division’s line battalions.
I saw the backs of brown uniforms, whose owners wore rusty helmets and were arming themselves with the guns of the G.I’s they’d just overrun. The half-full moon painted their dead flesh bluer than it would have seemed by day, but the dirty-snow gray of them was no trick of the light.
One of them jerked up his snout when I came back to life. He probably smelled my blood, even though he didn’t have much of a nose left. The helmet he wore had a blue outline of an Indian arrowhead, with a yellow T in the middle. So he was from the 36th Division, the “Texas Army,” and not one of my guys. Or rather, the owner of the helmet was. Probably “had been,” rather than “was.”
I held the wooden foregrip down and loosed a long burst into the vampire’s face. Each round of my special magazine was silver. It blew him up the same way lead would have, except his wounds didn’t heal like holes in soft mud.
That magazine cost me a hundred bucks for the silver alone, plus a bullet mold I got off a Frenchman in exchange for six cartons of Luckies, but it was worth it. He dropped like the dead weight he should’ve been.
I raked his buddies as they turned around, then raised the Thompson to aim one shot into each head. Yes, the sights are there for a reason, even if most rounds in actual combat are aimed in the manner one aims a fire extinguisher.
Another Un-dead Russian turned around in front of me, which would have been behind our lines as I faced backwards. He’d heard my chattergun, and I guess he got curious. He certainly didn’t look worried.
I didn’t remember how many I had left, but experimentation proved there was at least one more. He spun around, hit in the side near the waist, and his leg folded under him.
But down isn’t out, ever, with the Un-dead.
He couldn’t move, but he was speaking, slowly, with great emphasis, enunciating each rolling syllable. Really trying to impress me with the seriousness of what he said. But I don’t speak Russian, and I don’t want to learn, although I did recognize one barnyard noun. The voodoo magic tickled my ears a little, nothing more, as I rummaged in the bottom of the hole.
“Loot?” said Higgins at the vampire’s side, just as I came up with a phosphorus grenade.
Well, I couldn’t set Higgins on fire, unless he was one of Them already. And really, nobody turns that fast. I don’t care how they’ve spent their lives, it just doesn’t happen.
Higgins was pointing his grease gun at me, held in one shaking hand.
“Cripes, Higgins,” I said. “It’s me, Murphy.”
In friend-or-foe situations on overrun battlefields, I never, ever, identify myself as “Sergeant Murphy.” Lotta guys have authority problems. Like the gag goes, “Me, I like officers. They make me wanta live until the war’s over.” Sergeants aren’t the same, but they may be even worse.
But Higgins kept trying to aim at me one-handed, holding himself up with the other arm, even though his face plainly showed that he didn’t want to do it. His teeth were skinned back like he was trying to reach his ears with his grimace. Why did he think he had to wax me?
Aw, heck. Radioman on the Eastern Front, where until recent times our allies spoke…what language again, Murphy?
Yeah. He spoke enough Russian that he was under some vampire’s spell.
I dropped back into the hole.
Higgins rattled off a short burst, then another one. But the vampire snarled a command and he quit. Poor guy was probably trying to burn up his ammo.
So I stuck my helmet up on a rifle, and he blasted away at it. Didn’t hit anything, either. I waited for the dead man’s click, and yep! There it was.
I threw the helmet to the side and came up with the rifle braced on the lip of the hole, lining up on the Russian I’d winged. He was right where I left him. Instead of raising the barrel a touch to bring the sights into line, I hunched a little lower. The post centered in the notch.
I got a full eight shots before the Garand clip went ping! and bounced away. At least one of them was argent.
The vampire stopped talking. Higgins threw his grease gun away, as far as he could with one good arm. He sagged onto it, unable to hold himself up any longer. There was blood on his sleeve—the crafty son of a genius bitch had been aiming at me with his bad hand, no doubt on purpose.
Like I said, the Force attracted an uncommon level of ability.
* * * * *
I had no future in the hole I was in, so I scrambled up, toting Thompson, rifle, and grenade, and, stopping to retrieve my helmet, all with two and a half hands, it seemed like. The Thompson strap was in my teeth.
Then I had to put everything down to drag Higgins into the slit trench next to our motor pool. The guys hated digging those things, since the last time the Enemy mounted a serious air raid was before most of them got here. But Vatunska liked digging, and he got it done faster than a squad of goldbricking GIs would have anyway. And yeah, air was a dead issue, but trenches are good in all sorts of unexpected ways.
A truck’s rear end dropped into the dirt, and I tensed—this attack had begun with an underground approach. But the hand that dug out the wall of the trench had a khaki sleeve on it, and Vatunska was a different color than Old World dwarves. He terriered out between us with a long leather bag on his chest, since diggers can’t load up their backs and belts with gear the way we upright types do.
Upright by choice, that is. Right now, low was beautiful.
“Zech-ult,” he barked, hawking to clear his nostrils of dirt. That was as close as he got to “Sergeant.”
“Sey got se mortar pits, an’ se cook tent. Sey all around de ZeePee. I got grenades, but—sey too close to our guys.”
“Are you absolutely sure they got the mortar pits?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I chust come from dere.”
“Then we know right where they are,” I replied, straightening the pin on my phosphorus grenade.
Higgins dropped the rifle he was trying to hold. He was going into shock.
I didn’t think he was about to crash; but I did give him a hard looking over, and a good thing, too. The interruption forced me to think—what had I been doing?
Oh, yeah. I had been about to throw a grenade into a pit full of mortar ammunition, right in the middle of our company area.
They talk about combat reflexes, but tonight I wasn’t making real good decisions on autopilot. I bent the pin on the grenade back down.
“How many are there, near as you can tell?” I demanded.
“Two in se mortar pits,” Vatunska said. “About se same at se cook tent. But two, three chumping in foxholes in each platoon area. Ve looking at tvelve guys at least.”
“All vampires?”
“Sey don’t care about bullets,” he confirmed. “Some die, but se others don’t even take cover. And I saw sem stop to bite our wounted.”
Did I say there wasn’t any such thing as an all-vampire platoon?
Well, at the time I said it, I thought it was true.
Now, though, I just held onto the hope there wasn’t any such thing as an all-vampire company.
I wriggled over to First Platoon and gathered them up, then we all made a dash for the CP. We were carrying some wounded, and the vampires in the camp weren’t, but they didn’t notice us at first, which was providentially lucky. As in, too lucky to be anything but divinely assisted.
But they were right on us as we hauled the wounded into the CP dugout, trying to stay out of the lane of fire of our thirty-caliber machine guns. There was a decided lack of fire opposing this vampire raid, and I hated to think what that might mean in terms of dead and wounded.
Three men were manning one of the thirties, clipping ammo belts together and hosing the barrel back and forth through a fairly wide arc. One guy, Larzelere, was pointing out targets, which made it less likely they were going to saw some GIs in half. Simms kept the barrel moving, seeking out each target Larzelere called, while Pruitt, his helmet missing, fed the chain of bullets into the gun.
They knocked the legs out from under most of the attackers and kept hitting them on the ground. Most of the rounds wouldn’t do anything lasting to the Un-dead, but as long as they kept having new things to deal with, they weren’t getting up.
The gun seized up, and Simms jerked the cocking handle twice, like you’re supposed to. Pruitt leaned across and shook the gun back and forth, then sat back down. It started firing again.
Larzelere used Lubricant, Small Arms, to cool the barrel, pouring it right through the ventilated jacket in a cloud of smoke. The smell was straight out of an overtaxed engine’s final moments.
“Pruitt!” I yelled, trying for the least important member of the gun team. Simms wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
“Yeah, Lootenant!” Pruitt said with a great big grin. “We’re kicking their butts, ain’t we!”
“Pruitt, did you fire flares?” I shouted. “Does command know what’s going on?”
“Zwergbaum did!” he shot back. “He fired some red flares about twenty minutes ago. From over there!”
He pointed at the radio dugout, to the right of the gun. Twenty minutes? How long had I been in Hell’s backyard?
One brownsuit somehow got back up on his feet and rushed us as Simms swept the other way. I raised my Thompson, which I hadn’t remembered to reload. Larzelere grabbed for his pistol.
The Russian leapt. The brown suit tumbled to the ground, shirt, pants, and jacket, as the vampire inside melted his flesh into the shape of a bat the size of a German shepherd.
He fluttered straight into Simms’ shoulder, at the juncture of head and neck.
Simms gave a scream I won’t try to render alphabetically, and reared back from the gun. He ran into Larzelere, knocking him back a step. Pruitt looked around uselessly, and I grabbed for my rifle, bringing it up from the trench. The silvered bayonet blazed white as the moonlight hit it.
Larzelere caught himself with his off hand, extended his arm and shot the bat with the muzzle of his pistol maybe six inches away.
It flopped back but didn’t let go. It was attached to Simms at the neck.
All four of us were yelling at this point, but I don’t remember what.
I wanted to stab it with the bayonet, but Simms turned towards me, then bent at the waist, trying to get away from the bat. I didn’t want to stab him in the neck.
He stood up straight, grabbing at the bat with both hands, and Larzelere shot it again. One of Simms’ hands flew away, still attached to the arm but minus a couple of fingers.
The bat screeched. The noise stabbed me in the ears.
But that meant it was a silver bullet, and it was hurt. I held out the rifle in both hands.
I couldn’t stab Simms, but I could hold the bayonet still and steady next to his head. The way he was flailing around, sooner or later he was bound to hit it. I turned the blade straight up and down so he wouldn’t cut his face.
And sure enough, he lurched left, slapping the bat right into the length of the silver bayonet. Larzelere grabbed him around the waist, and I turned the blade sideways, so it was edging into the bat, and cut upward diagonally. I put a swoop on it to avoid cutting into Simms’ skull.
Or I tried to, anyway. The blade grated on steel. Simms, unlike Pruitt, was wearing his helmet.
Caught between silver and steel, the bat screeched again and fell to the bottom of the trench. Where I stabbed it, over and over. We couldn’t see if it had stopped moving, so I didn’t stop either.
Pruitt got behind the gun and jerked the cocking handle. A thirty-caliber round popped out of the breech; it was already loaded. Pruitt mashed his thumbs on the triggers, and the gun spat tracers.
I didn’t see what he was shooting at.
Presently, I stopped stabbing into the bat where it lay in the dirt. I breathed hard, trying to get my wind back. Crisis solved.
Next crisis: the Enemy recon had found the Line. Had they found the artillery and air emplacements behind the Line? The fuel dumps, the trucks, all the soft stuff we needed to survive up here?
I didn’t know. But the cooks and mechanics back there would have a better chance if they knew what was up. I had to get to a radio.
Or failing that, I had to send up some flares. Red was the signal for enemy in sight; two was an attack, three was a major attack. I felt three flares were justified here.
If Dave had already done that, though, I had other urgent places to be. I needed to know.
“Pruitt! Can you handle the gun with Larzelere?”
But Larzelere was already kneeling between the butterfly triggers. Pruitt fed another belt into the breech.
“We got it, Murph!” he said. “They ain’t gettin’ past here.”
“Vatunska!” I exclaimed. And then I said what we’re supposed to say. Although I had an objective, this time, we were supposed to say it even when we had no idea what we were trying to do.
“Follow me.”
We made it to the radio hole without getting hit. I heard a Thompson and a Garand, both American issue, but there were little dirt splashes near us. So the Enemy was using captured weapons against us, which wasn’t exactly a new trick, but wasn’t good news either. Also, they kept firing high.
A dugout differs from a plain old hole in that it has overhead cover, excavated underneath rather than piled on top. You’d dig a trench, say, deep enough to stand in without exposing your head. Then you’d kneel down and start digging into the trench wall, halfway down at least (and more was better) until you’d hacked a little room into the side of the trench. The only way uninvited guests could drop in on you was to fall into the trench and then roll sideways into the dugout opening, which was possible but not likely.
Your dads probably dug them in the First War. Mine, of course, found a way out of it.
Vatunska dropped into the trench and vanished as though he had stepped into black-brown water. I took a quick look around first, to confirm the raiders’ whereabouts. They were still split into at least two groups, mortar pit and cook tent, and had fallen back—or been shot away—from the CP in the middle. Could be worse.
“Hey, Murphy,” called Dave Zwergbaum from the gloom. “C’mon in, gentle forest creature.”
He welcomed me with a wave from the upholstered settee he was reclining on. Someone had dragged it into the dugout somehow, probably from a wrecked house. The nearest town was some miles away, but we Yanks have a lot of vehicles—they probably strapped it on the back of a jeep, or slung it down the middle of a weapons carrier.
He seemed indecently comfortable for the opening stages of a vampire attack. He had on a leather football helmet, like the tankers wear, with goggles and gloves to match. His overalls were crusted with dirt, from digging in it, and grease, from tinkering. He was a full-blooded dwarf from Flatbush, which explained the amulets, grease, and goggles, but he used to be more strict about avoiding the temptations of his ancestry. Since we got back from Hell, he was enjoying life on Earth so much, he was starting to go native.
Which irritated me, because old-fashioned dwarves are crazy as bedbugs. And never mind that we had one in our own headquarters platoon: Vatunska would agree with me.
But you can’t argue with nature. The amulets up and down Dave’s arm rattled and jingled as he returned it to his side, after brushing the roof with his expansive front-porch wave.
“Don’t get up,” I groused. “We’re not being overrun or anything.”
“Overrun? Hey, if we were being overrun, would I be here?” he said. “They’d have come in here and given me the business, you know? Two in the chest an’ one in the head. Or hey, hey—try this on for size. Maybe I’m dead, and I don’t know it yet.”
“You’ve seen where you’re going,” I said. “It’s better than this.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said, waggling his hand this way and that. “I still got the burden of free will. My reservation ain’t carved in stone yet.”
He shoved a piece of thin tracing paper at me. We use it for map overlays, so we don’t have to keep erasing the same map over and over. The radio guys keep a map and overlay handy, because sometimes they get complicated instructions which are easier to draw than relay in words. Faster, anyway.
This one showed our camp, with the truck park, cook tent, mortar pit, dispensary and CP labelled. Off to the right were the words 141ST INF, a Texas outfit, while on the left was 1 POL, indicating the presence of unknown Polish units, or maybe the possible presence of any Polish units. Last I’d heard, there was supposed to be something there, but we didn’t know what. We were co-located with 142ND INF, which was just as good as the 141st, in my opinion.
“How’s the radio?” I asked, and then remembered to say, “Did you shoot up three red flares when the attack started?”
“Sure, I shot ‘em,” Dave agreed. “And a Green Star Cluster for emphasis. Sort of like an underline,” he said, chuckling. “In green ink. But the radio’s had it. We dusted for gremlins, but Higgins was out with you, an’ Martini, he was left behind, but he don’t know his way around a radio set too good. Oh, but yeah, he’s got crystal ball contact with the regiment we’re attached to, mmhm. Gave ‘em all the skinny. Listen, how’s Second Platoon?”
Second was on the left, out toward our notional Polish allies. I hadn’t been over there yet. Third was here, holding the fort, along with our weapons platoon—squad, really. So Second was the only part of our outfit I hadn’t checked on.
I had the happy idea of sending Dave to check on them. He looked so comfortable I felt like evening the playing field a little. But it wasn’t really his responsibility; it was mine. I had the power to spread the pain around, no question. But the right? I’d served under officers who played that way—I didn’t want to be that guy.
So I said, “I dunno, Dave. Wanna take charge of holding what we got while I go see?”
“Sure I wanna,” he said. “Defending’s easy. Figure out what they’re tryin’ to do, then hit ‘em while they’re doin’ it. How’d they come? Anything special?”
“Yeah, I’d say so. They came in underground.”
“Dwarves?” he said with a strain in his voice. He pawed through the amulets looking for a Star of David.
“Vamps,” I corrected him. I could have said “Human vamps,” but that would have been as useful as saying “Russian Russians. From Russia.” Nobody can be made into a vampire but sons of Adam, which maybe is just as well. If we could arrange to fight this war in an all-dwarf province somewhere, or in Far Elfland, they’d run out of troops pretty quick.
But I don’t want to see what happens if the Enemy gets into the Shining City of Glass. And as for vampire dwarves, brr! No thank you. A squad (I hoped, nothing bigger than a squad) of vampire burrowers was looking like a bit more than we could handle. A whole tribe, or kingdom, or whatever they had, of burrowing bloodsuckers?
I nodded despite myself. This situation didn’t look so bad anymore.
“Listen, we gotta keep these guys split up,” I told Dave. “We got two thirty-cals working outside the CP, and they’re right in the middle. If they both fire along these lanes,” I said, sketching with a stub of pencil I kept in my shirt pocket, “then these vamps over here at the mortar pit can’t link up with those vamps over there, by the cook tent. Capice?”
“Capistrano, mon capitan,” he returned, talking lazily but eyes sharp on the map. “Two guns means, one guy gets a jam or whatever, the other guy can keep shootin’. Easy peasy.”
* * *
Second platoon was hurting; they’d had an eruption of tunneling vampires, too. But they’d beaten them down, mostly with grenades, which left half their strength nursing shrapnel wounds. Nobody’d actually burned a fellow American with white phos, which was a blessing but not a surprise. We’re all leery of using that stuff carelessly.
Well, unless we’re hopped up on horror from just coming back from Hell.
I didn’t think they could spare anyone, given that the wounded couldn’t move. So I left them in place, consolidated into three big fighting positions. I crept back to the CP.
Dave had kept both machine guns firing, so the area was sliced into three wedges, one of which didn’t contain any enemy. There was fire coming back, which sounded just like ours, of course, since they were using our weapons.
Three vampires kept moving around, leaping up or shooting back. They had to get below ground before sunrise, so I guess they couldn’t take it slow. Which was as well, because as soon as we ran out of machine-gun ammunition, they could rush us.
We shot some, and they shot some, barely audible over the MGs. I saw one throw up his arms and burst into dusty bones; he must have been an old one. Sometimes, when they die, all their deferred age catches up with them, like a mummy in the movies. Other times not. Nobody knows why, or if they do, they haven’t told me.
The left-hand gun jammed, and Pruitt couldn’t clear it. So Larzelere ran out into the field, bayonet fixed, and so help me he successfully stuck one of the vampires right in the gut. It flopped around, throwing Larzelere head over heels, but with that rifle sticking up out of him his concealment was blown. Everybody in Third and Headquarters platoons shot him until the fragments stopped moving.
With only one enemy left, we could have covered the area with grenades—there were enough of us—but we didn’t want to blow Larzelere up with him. I guess that’s the difference between them and us, that and respiration.
So it seems like cool reason and geometric logic would have told us to jump out of our holes and rush the bloodsucker, shooting all the way. But in fact, it wasn’t anything like that which made us do it. Fact is, I don’t remember deciding to charge in at all; we were just doing it, firing every step or two, keeping the vamp’s head down.
He started turning into mist, and we blew pieces off him until he gave up vaporizing and just collapsed. Then we shot the ashes some more.
Larzelere was okay. He retrieved his fancy custom-decorated bayonet, and, as we took cover again, I saw him borrow another knife off Lodge. Maybe he wanted to carve another notch.
Now we were on the right of the other two vamps, including the officer, who were still stuck in one wedge of our fire pattern. And without any friendlies in among ‘em, we could just throw thermite grenades by the dozen until they finally caught fire. Hey, it wasn’t my choice to fight in an American supply dump, it was theirs.
Funny thing: for guys who live on liquid protein, they’re pretty dry inside. They burn up like sawdust.
So my eyes were dazzled by sun-bright fires, and everything in the world smelled like burnt matches when it was over. At least I could still hear.
I wasn’t sure if we got them both. There was only one skeleton, so maybe one of them turned into mist and skated away. It wasn’t as if Franz hadn’t heard the racket already, but we didn’t need a bloodhound leading a reaction force back on top of us.
I put First Platoon on outpost on both sides of the phase line we were guarding. Everybody else reloaded out of the jeeps. A handful of silver bullets cost a month’s pay, but there were enough to go around now that our supply lines crossed open terrain. For the first time, we had everything the T.O. says a company’s supposed to have: a clerk, a cook, a deacon, a crystal ball operator, and even a medic.
He’s not an M.D. or anything; we’re not a battalion yet.
But the Army had to find a way to use men whose conscience wouldn’t let them kill. Thus, the designated medic who doesn’t carry a gun. We can’t afford to waste that much goodness, even if they did run to the weird. Heck, as far as weird goes, who am I to point the finger?
Our mission was, and still remained, to locate and identify enemy units between our army and Przemysl, to include the town and its surroundings. I guess you don’t have to be Napoleon to deduce that General Patton was planning to come through there next. Although there are a heap of divisions in Third Army, all with recon companies of their very own. Maybe K Company, 33rd Division, was scoping out a town on a different map section altogether, with K Co. of the 29th Division searching another place. Maybe Patton would compare our reports before he made up his mind.
I’d be sure to ask him next time we were sharing a beer at the NCO Club.
But until we got around to that, one of my guys had been bitten.
* * * * *
The manual wasn’t much help. It read:
Field Manual 200-3 Vampire Survival Guide
Prepared by the Department of Defense Against the Dark Arts
with the cooperation of
the U.S. Army Sorcery Corps (“Knowledge is Firepower”)
and the First Spiritual Scouting Force (“Look Out Below!”)
A U.S. Government Publication
For copies, send 5 cents to DDADA, The Pentagram, Arlington, Vir.
VAMPIRES are the most dangerous weapons the Enemy has. They are human beings whose bodies have died but who continue to move and think through the power of the Enemy. Most have been corrupted and willingly serve the Enemy, while some are mindless beasts motivated solely by rage or fear.
Unlike demons, vampires can exist on Earth indefinitely without additional reinforcement from Below. Instead, they can steal the blood of the living, subsisting on stolen life. Without blood, the vampire must appeal to Hell for additional energy, which Hell is often reluctant to grant.
Vampires cannot store unlimited amounts of blood. Therefore, they must feed at least once every three days. It is possible to drink a small amount of blood from several sources, but those sources then sicken, die, and rise again as new vampires. Alternatively, the vampire may completely drain his victim, in which case, the victim does not rise again.
STRENGTHS:
Vampires are superhumanly strong. A vampire can move blood about his body at will, so if he wishes to open a door, for example, he can channel his entire blood supply into his arm, making it disproportionately strong. He can also use more blood per second than the human norm, expending his blood supply in a burst of extreme strength.
However, a vampire cannot increase the durability of his bones. Therefore, he cannot apply more force than his bones can withstand. A vampire lifting the front end of a tank, for example, would break his arm bones before the tank left the ground.
Maximum effort allows a vampire to lift about 2,000 pounds, almost the weight of a Jeep. A vampire can leap to a fourth-floor window from a standing start, or punch through an inch of oak or one course of bricks. However, such a punch will shatter all the bones in the vampire’s hand.
More immediately, a vampire can slash open a human body to a depth of several inches with his nails, choke a person with one hand, or tear off a limb without great difficulty.
Vampires are superhumanly fast. As quickly as his mind decides to move, the vampire’s blood causes his body to move. Signals travel much faster through the bloodstream of a vampire than through the nerves of a living man. A vampire can sometimes duck bullets and always outrun a human. Vampires have been observed running 40 mph for short distances. They do not do so often, suggesting that moving quickly requires more of their blood reserves than exerting extreme strength.
Vampires do not feel pain from injuries. A vampire’s senses are generally more acute than a human’s, but the pain sense appears largely or entirely absent. Many vampires have been shot in the back and not noticed the wound at all. Blows to the face, eyes, or kidneys which produce crippling pain in humans are not effective against the vampire.
Vampires do not bleed. Without a heartbeat to provide pressure, their blood does not flow from wounds. It may leak, depending on the angle of the wound, but this is nothing to count on, as the vampire immediately senses a loss of blood and will usually bandage the wound or alter his posture to stop the leakage. Simply flexing the punctured muscle will stop the vampire from losing additional blood.
Vampires can compel the will of the weak-minded. A vampire’s voice creates either a soothing or a frightening effect on his hearer, depending on the hearer’s preconceptions. Some vampires can modulate this effect, choosing whether to inflict fear or fascination, or, with greater effort, cause neither, addressing the hearer without emotional overtones.
This power is not absolute; many people have resisted the vampire’s commands, and some can resist the fear effect as well. In fact, it appears to be substantially weaker than that of our British ally’s Commando Corps. It also appears to require considerable effort, leaving the vampire fatigued. Some vampires have given up the struggle to compel a soldier’s will rather than do the hard work required.
Vampire compulsion is enhanced by direct eye contact. Never meet a vampire’s eyes if you can avoid it. Our enemies’ unwillingness to learn English has also produced the beneficial side effect that few American soldiers can understand the commands they are compelled to obey. If you do not understand a vampire’s commands, you may feel a frustrating desire to obey, but you will not have to actually do anything.
Hungarian-Americans, Roumanian-Americans, and speakers of the Gypsy language are traditionally assigned to the Pacific for their own protection. If you understand these languages, tell your Commanding Officer before you are assigned to the European Theater of Operations.
Because Germany is the chief battleground in Europe, we need German speakers there. The Enemy has some German-speaking vampires, but most do not.
WEAKNESSES:
Vampires suffer burning from sunlight. A few minutes of direct sunlight will char a vampire to the bone. Overcast sunshine, daylight filtered through rain or snow, or light through dirty windows cause discomfort but not burning. This weakness is therefore of limited usefulness in Central Europe, where sunny days are uncommon.
Artificial light sources have no similar effect, regardless of intensity. Efforts continue to perfect artificial sunlight. However, vampires do appear to be vulnerable to fire, as field tests of flamethrowers have demonstrated.
Vampires have no reflection and cannot be photographed. They also cast no shadows, and some reports suggest electric spotlights or flashlights pass through vampires, rendering them effectively invisible. Moonlight, however, illuminates them perfectly well, as does the light of campfires, candles, and, of course, torches.
Vampires are allergic to the flesh of the Old Folk. Elves, dwarves, trolls, and other pagan survivals partake of a magic different from, and inimical to, the power of the Fallen. They do not necessarily recoil from the sight of a dwarf or troll, but contact with them causes the vampire intense physical pain. Most vampires cannot control the pain well enough to effectively engage an Old Folk individual in hand-to-hand combat, although using a bayonet, or a club, is still eminently possible. Old Folk soldiers can be used as vampire detection aids; although the vampire can lie perfectly still, and has no body heat, often he will flinch as the Old Folk individual passes by.
Vampires fear the Cross. Soldiers of any faith, or none, may use the Cross to repel vampires. This does not necessarily mean that the Cross has an objective power outside its holder; it may simply be that vampires, although enemies of Christ, certainly believe in Him and fear His displeasure.
MYTHS:
Vampires CAN cross running water. They may experience discomfort because they do not reflect in the water, but experiments with fire hoses have proven that running water by itself cannot harm vampires.
Vampires do NOT fear garlic. Our major opponent in this war is the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Without a tolerance for garlic, our enemies would be unable to operate in most of that nation’s towns and villages.
Vampires CANNOT change into bats. No reliable report of a vampire becoming a bat has been received from a sane survivor of a vampire encounter.
Upon Being Bitten
IF YOU ARE BITTEN, you will become a vampire within 36 hours. There is no known cure or vaccine. A demon enters your body with the vampire’s blood and will attempt to take over your personality. But you can take steps to defend yourself from the demon.
Upon being bitten, you must immediately do these things: COVER every exposed surface of skin from exposure to sunlight.
Do not ask your buddies to help you; they may smell irresistibly appetizing. Remember overhead cover; it is just as important now as under artillery bombardment. Use your shelter half, if you have one, to block the light. As a general rule, anything which is waterproof will stop sunlight.
If it is night, dig a tunnel at a sharp angle to the ground, long enough that you can lie in it without exposing your head. Do not enter the tunnel head-first.
JETTISON all crosses, Bibles, prayer cards or other religious paraphernalia. They cause the demon pain, and its pain will be felt by you. This causes fear and anger, both of which assist the demon in subverting your personality.
HOLD YOUR BREATH. At some point, your breathing will stop. If this happens unexpectedly, it can trigger panic, which will assist the demon’s efforts. If you are already not breathing, the shock will be greatly lessened, or even eliminated. Some soldiers have stopped breathing without even noticing the change.
REMAIN CALM. You will feel a sense of horror and anger. This is not coming from you! It is the demon which lives in the vampire’s blood, trying to infiltrate your personality. It wants to make you give up and bite one of your buddies. Once you have drunk the blood of the living, you will be one of Them. But these feelings are not your fault. You are not doomed.
If necessary, direct your rage at the enemy, who put you here.
USE YOUR MORPHINE. Morphine is often given to vampire casualties; although it makes the victim less able to resist, the relaxation produced by morphia is difficult for the demon to turn into wrath. Use your morphine Syrette if you have one.
Note: some demons have reportedly been able to bypass morphine euphoria, subtly establishing themselves below the casualty’s conscious awareness. This may not be a real possibility. If it is, however, the damage can be repaired in a civilian hospital and is nothing to worry about.
PREPARE FOR DEATH. You are going to die; the bite of the vampire is one hundred percent lethal. Resisting death, though usually vital in wounds, is risky in vampire bite cases, as it provokes fear and rage which the demon can use to control you.
The good news, however, is that you will soon be out of the Army. The U.S. Army does not admit vampires into its ranks. You have given your life for your country and have therefore done all your country can ask of you.
In the event you still wish to serve, the British Army does admit vampires of high “social class.” This term does not mean the same thing in Britain as it does in the U.S. For example, millionaires are not necessarily high-class if their money was earned rather than inherited. There are numerous exceptions and special cases, which every Britisher can explain and no American can understand.
* * *
There was a whole section about whether or not you’d actually been bitten, but this wasn’t exactly a gray area. Everybody in the headquarters platoon had seen Simms flopping left and right while a huge black bat shook him by the neck, its wings clamped around his face. So yeah, that qualified.
Also, Martini’s crystal ball was showing Simms huddled under my jeep. No matter how he tuned it, it kept showing Simms from different angles. Want to call Third Army? He got Simms’ elbow. Air Corps? Simms’ boots. If you asked the air spirit in Martini’s crystal, Simms was the Most Important Thing on the whole Eastern Front.
“Simms?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Go away,” he sobbed. “I don’t need any help.”
“Look, we need to get you under cover. The sun’s going to be up soon.”
“I’m not a vampire!”
“Well…” It didn’t seem helpful to set him straight.
“The bite is like its own living thing, pal,” said Dave beside me. He was down on his knees and elbows, looking Simms in the eye. “S’not you who’s a vampire, no. You’re still a guy. But you got a baby demon stuck to your neck, all right? Sunlight’ll make it hurt. And that’ll make you hurt. We don’t wantcha to hurt, am I right? ‘Course I’m right.”
I didn’t know if Simms was paying any attention, as I was crouched down by the door where his head was. But I looked over into Martini’s crystal, and I could see he was curled around the front wheel, looking in Dave’s direction.
“Yeah, so, anyway…we made you a shelter,” Dave continued. “It’s a tunnel with a shelter half over the entrance. You can wriggle into it like a sleeping bag, and we got a space at the top where you can eat your K-rats, read a book or whatever. It’s pretty nice.”
“It’s a grave!” Simms yelled back. He had a point.
“It’s not a grave,” Dave insisted. “Look, your head’s gonna be out above ground and everything. You got your arms free. If you don’t like it, you can climb out any time you want. But that bite’s gonna be hurting like a mother’s son pretty soon, so you gotta get with it, man.”
Dave seemed to be managing Simms okay, so I didn’t add anything.
“Hey, Sarge,” Pruitt demanded.
“We gonna get scouts out before dawn? We gotta know which way to take these hunks o’ junk as soon as we can see, or we’re not gonna make it back to our lines.”
“Your sticks tell you that?” I said, calling attention to the fact that he was acting like my executive officer rather than a specialist with some bent rods. Maybe I was too subtle.
“No. I got born with two eyes and a brain, which qualifies as some kind of supernatural power in this man’s Army,” Pruitt said. “Seriously, you wanna try and get through this mess at first light? We’d be lucky to make it a mile by dark.”
“This woods isn’t so bad.”
“It’s the woods! Of course it’s bad,” Pruitt insisted. Well, he had me there. But they don’t throw wars on 42nd Street.
“Hey,” said Dave, looking up. “Simms says, how do we know the bat was a vampire? He’s got a good point.”
“It was as big as a backpack,” I scoffed. “You telling me that’s natural?”
“Mmyeah, but Murph, y’know, it’s Poland,” said Dave, as though it said everything.
I stared him into clarifying. “Maybe they got big bats.”
“Simms?” I said, cutting out the middleman. “Simms, you gotta get in the hole. I’m not kidding around now.”
“I’m not dead!” he said. “Why won’t anyone believe me?”
Military courtesy wasn’t being preserved here. The Force was pretty informal in the field—the last time I’d heard ‘sir’ it was part of ‘encirclement’—but Simms’ panic was setting a bad example. I needed to get this back on track.
I looked around at our laager. Each platoon had several jeeps crammed with machine guns and K-ration boxes. If Simms could eat a K, or the awful alleged chocolate our D-ration bars were made out of, he wasn’t a vampire. Maybe we could try that.
We also had three half-tracks for the heavy stuff. One was full of long-range radio gear and a darkroom for the crystal ball operator, but the other two had our big guns: a 75mm antitank gun and an Anson lamp with Fresnel lenses, acquired special from the Navy. The antitank gun would kill a lot more than just tanks, while the lamp made artificial sunlight. Vampires reacted to it almost the same as the real Sun, which was mighty handy in our book.
Yes, I know the manual says we can’t make artificial sunlight. As far as I know, the Army still doesn’t know that the Navy can, in fact, do just that. Fortunately the Force had some connections.
I felt an idea forming under the rim of my helmet. It itched. “Where’s that bat?” I demanded of Pruitt.
“What bat?”
“The bat that bit Simms.”
“I dunno. They killed it, right? Hey, Martini! Where’s that bat at?”
Martini looked up from his crystal ball with a persecuted look. “Oh, maan…I keep telling you! You, him, everybody; I don’t know. I do NOT know, okay? I can’t tune in on anything but Simms, there. If he don’t have that bat tucked up his back side, I ain’t seeing it.”
“You seen it with your eyes?” I demanded. “Not since Lodge took it off to the cookhouse.”
“It’s a bat! It’s a vampire bat!” I insisted, though no one was objecting. “You can’t cook a vampire bat.”
“The South’s its own country, Sarge,” Pruitt said. “They do things really different down there.”
I stomped off to find Lodge, doubting on the one hand that he would try to eat a vampire in bat form, but also doubting that he wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s not a good policy to be totally without fear.
Although Grace seemed to be making a go of it. I saw him crouch down beside the Jeep, talking to Simms.
Now look, I wasn’t eavesdropping. But with the pointy ears comes awareness of sound, okay? I can’t exactly turn it off.
I heard Simms say, “I’m going to Hell!” And then Grace said:
“No, you’re not. You’re not. The Enemy can’t do that to you. God won’t let him. Only you can send yourself to Hell. No one else.”
“God can!” Almost a cry.
“God won’t.” Grace was clear and audible. “He never has, TJ. Hell is where you fall when you separate from God. Men fall from God by their own grace, not His.”
That’s right. Simms’ given name was TJ. I’d known that once. “But I’m a vampire!” Simms insisted. “It bit me…the curse is in my blood.”
“So? Do you remember a commandment not to get bitten?”
“Well…no.”
“You’re sure, now? This is very important.”
“That ain’t funny, Grace. You know there’s nothing against getting hurt by the Devil.”
“How about despair? Anything against that? Is that a sin, TJ?”
“…yes. Yes, damn it…”
“Don’t damn it! Don’t. It’s the Law. Despair is a sin, TJ. Don’t give up.”
A silence. Then Grace again:
“Now, are you going to Hell?” Deep breathing. Silence. “TJ?”
“I think I am, Grace. I really do. I can feel it…happening.”
“Do you want to go?”
“No. No!”
“Then don’t.”
A brushing sound, muddy. “Is this your cross, TJ?”
“Yeah. Sarge said the manual said to…”
“The manual isn’t God’s child, TJ. Here. Take up your cross. Carry it. It’s yours, too.” “Thanks. It’s not so bad…”
“It isn’t?”
“Like Hell it’s not. It is. It’s bad! But He took worse for me.”
“Yes He did. So hang in there.”
There were some sounds like a dog in pain, then, “I’m losing it, Grace. The Devil’s winning.”
“He can’t win if you don’t let him win, TJ.”
“You don’t know, Grace. But I’m a sinner,” Simms said. “I know how bad I am.”
“Maybe. Maybe you’re bad,” Grace said back. “But you aren’t a cannibal, TJ Simms. You wouldn’t eat the innocent in order to cheat your natural death, would you? Because that’s what’s on offer here. You have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God, but by His name I tell you truly: you’re not as far fallen as them.
“I don’t know your soul, TJ, but I can’t see you ever being that bad.”
“I…I…”
“God bless it, Simms! I know you’re supposed to have your own free will, but damn my eyes, you are NOT going down with them! I won’t permit it!”
He sounded serious as murder, as in being on the edge of committing it. Funny for a guy in my place to be saying, you say? Tell it to the Marines. I been in this war three years now and I never murdered anybody.
“You won’t permit it?” Simms was saying. “Screw you, Grace! It ain’t up to you—my soul is MY business!”
“And no one else’s!” Grace agreed. “Yeah! Including that devil which wants to share your body and mind, right? It ain’t any of his business either!”
“Yeah—”
“Then why are you putting up with his filth? Kick him the Hell out!”
I missed some stuff then, but I made up for it afterward, when I came back to the Jeep.
Look, I don’t see spirits or spooks or specters, or anything like that. That part of the stereotype I don’t live up to.
But how would you know if you could see the immaterial? I mean, all you know for sure is you haven’t seen it yet.
I remembered one time Grace had run out in front of a machine gun, to pick up Martini’s crystal ball case. Pruitt accused him of thinking he was bulletproof, and Grace said maybe he was. But he didn’t feel like finding out for sure.
So it wasn’t at all expected when I came back, relieved (Lodge had wanted to burn the bat, and the cookhouse was the logical place to make a fire), and saw a shark-winged cloud of malice pouring out of Simms like his soul was on fire.
(Yes, I know sharks don’t have wings. I’m trying to describe something I never saw before, and unless you’re very unfortunate, you never have either.)
It was made of what looked like oily, stinking smoke, which pullulated like ants pouring out of a hive. At about ten feet tall, it stopped rising and started swelling into distinct parts, including some arms, some pincers like a crab, some spines, and several distinct kinds of other things. It had a lot of parts. And no, I didn’t assign it a name.
Simms was under the truck, still, but the cloud-thing jerked a couple of its tentacles and dragged him right out into the moonlight. Martini swung a rifle at it, and the smoke parted, to reveal a wetly glinting limb within, red and crusted. It flapped a wing and slapped Martini aside like a fly.
Dave sawed off a long burst from his BAR, which affected it less than the clubbed rifle had. At least, he angled it upward, so the slugs tore into the treetops. Pruitt, on the other hand, shot through the demon and past me, at about chest level. Fortunately, he quit when he saw he wasn’t doing any good.
And all the other men, including some who were right next to it, didn’t see a blessed thing. Not that there was one to see. They scattered, especially when Simms started flailing around. They couldn’t see what had hold of his chest.
The spirit, whatever it was called, gave a sort of hop and yanked Simms right under its crouching legs. A curved stinger like a gigantic wasp’s hung inches over Simms’ yelling mouth.
I was deciding whether to try silver bullets or another flare gun when Grace slammed into the thing from the side, bowling it over.
Dave, bless him, grabbed Simms and scooted him out of there on his back.
“C’mon, man! You don’t want no parta this!” he declared, and Simms seemed to agree.
I decided there was no time to decide and came up with a flare gun in my left hand and the Thompson balanced in my right. But Grace and the vampire spirit were tangled together, rolling around so neither was on top very long. I didn’t have a shot.
“Cochon!” screamed Larzelere, along with a lot of other stuff I didn’t catch. There weren’t a lot of Frenchies in lower Manhattan growing up. He stuck the thing with his bayonet, twisted hard, but its tissue was too dense to properly develop the wound, so Larzelere lay on his rifle, using his meager weight to tear the wound further open. Dreadful black gas dripped like oil from the wound.
The handle of Larzelere’s bayonet was decorated with some kind of scrollwork. He rolled, and it flashed in the moonlight—a man, spread-eagled on the hilt. Larzelere had sharpened a crucifix for the end of his rifle!
The thing whipped around—it had plenty of limbs—and tried stabbing Larzelere in turn. The little Frenchie thrust out his cross like a punch knife, grinding it deep into the thing’s skin. If it had been a foot closer, I swear Larzelere would have bitten it.
There was a lot of damage and a lot of fury; the thing didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, it bulged at the shoulders and marshaled its strength, then got a fistful of pincers around Larzelere’s bottom and threw him like a softball, up and over and down with a sickening thump.
Freed to concentrate on its main tormentor, the vampire-in-waiting stabbed Grace with some thorns, flailed him with some claws, and pinched with a pincer. The other pincer was pinned underneath its bulk. Grace, for his part, had his hands locked around its neck, but he didn’t seem to be squeezing to choke the thing; he just used the neck as a handle to haul it around, further and further from Simms.
That’s when I noticed the snake-whipping tendril connecting the thing to Simms’ neck. It was dug into the wound in his neck, looking more like a rose vine covered with hooks than a snake or a tentacle. I guess, anyway—I’ve never seen an octopus or a squid, except battered and fried in little slices.
The thing roared some curses I’d never heard before—in fact, I didn’t recognize the language, but I understood them anyway. Martini gulped, and Pruitt, of all people, looked sick; so they were hearing the meaning of the words as well.
No, I won’t repeat them here. Think I want that on my record, come the day?
So Grace, who was six-foot-something and solid, was wiping the floor with the vampire spirit, which was ten feet tall if it was an inch.
His shirt was in strips all over, but despite the hammering he was getting from tentacles, teeth, and talons, there wasn’t a mark on him. The thing got some leverage and spun him around, though, and I saw two long scars on his back, but they were old, long-healed. Not inflicted by the current monster, then.
It stabbed a hoof into the ground and reared up, lifting Grace clean off of his feet. The vine or whatever it was connecting to Simms jerked taut painfully.
Weirdly, being suspended in the air seemed to make Grace stronger. He shifted his grip to the back of the thing’s head and pulled. The crown of bone crackled, and the monster screamed.
“You’re not taking him,” Grace gritted through effort. “TJ’s a good man; he’s not for the likes of you. You’ll have to take me first.”
The vampire—because that’s what it was, a vampire without its skin—howled wordlessly. But it also flailed Grace with its talons and thorns, and now for some reason it was really drawing blood.
But it wasn’t getting into Grace the way it had gotten into Simms.
Still had its hooks in Simms, as a matter of fact.
“Larzelere!” I yelled. But he was still; although blood bubbled from his nose, so he was breathing.
I got over to Larzelere and found his rifle—he still had a grip like the rigor of tetanus on it with one hand. But I had two, so I was able to pry his fingers off, one by one.
The chamber was open, and there was dead grass and dirt inside, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need it as a rifle, I needed it as a spear.
I ran at the vampire-ghost with that long silver cross leading the way, pounding the dirt with my boot heels. Dave was hacking at the tendril leading back to Simms, but his shovel edge didn’t seem to bite, somehow. It didn’t go into the tentacle, and it didn’t go through it. It just…didn’t.
I felt my face twist up like it did in close combat, sometimes, but I didn’t let it carry me away. Good thing, too, because just before I got there, the vampire spirit swung Grace around half a circle. A step faster, and I’d have speared Grace right at the base of the spine.
I sidestepped, but that made my stab into a half-assed slash that took a piece out of the bulging armor-plated sac where its hips ought to be. Still, it let out a screech.
The head tried to whip around and pin me with an accusing gaze, but Grace had hold of the bony spines that stuck out behind its skull and was twisting for all he was worth. I guess he was worth a lot, because I heard creaking that sounded like it was just on the cusp of snapping.
He caught sight of me, and when he saw what I was holding, he actually smiled.
“That’s using your head, Sergeant!” he said approvingly. “Nothing like a little support from the higher echelons!”
It seemed to buoy him up—physically, he swayed a little higher off the ground—and with a sudden clap! like two boards smacking each other, the vampire-demon was looking the other way.
Which means he saw the cross-bayonet coming for his vitals.
Sometimes the geometry just plain works.
So he whistled and screamed, and the scream just kept getting higher and shriller and louder, even after his head lolled, most of the way broken loose, down his back between wings that were each jerking in a different rhythm. Grace dropped to the ground, still holding the thing, and the long tentacle leading to Simms’ neck went limp. Grace yanked it up and down, and it came free, its end trailing blood in the moonlight.
Still the scream continued. The night was full of it, the noise pressing the fields flat with its weight.
The top came off the hillock to the east.
It just disappeared, lifting a few feet into the air before it dissolved into a dirty windstorm headed up.
I saw the next set of flashes leaping up from the field between us and the scalped hillock before I heard the blasts from the first one. They weren’t far away, so it wasn’t the usual delay caused by the speed of sound. I just wasn’t putting it all together quick enough to keep up with how fast the terrain was changing.
Well, exploding.
Like cylinders in an engine, a part of Poland erupted every half-second, blowing dirt and pulverized vegetation all over us, head to toe. I heard nothing but concussions, saw nothing but flashes in the dark.
* * * * *
“COVER!” I roared, hurting my throat with effort. “TAKE COVER!”
No one reacted to my voice in the slightest. But I couldn’t very well blame them; I couldn’t hear myself either.
That idling engine was starting to pick up speed. You know how raindrops patter, then rattle, then roar as the impacts blend into a continuous blurry tone? Well, this was nothing like that except in its timing. The blasts, each one so loud I felt it on my skin as well as an actual bruising pain in my ears, blended together until I was being squeezed from every direction at once, the pressure fluttering but constant at the same time.
It wasn’t so bad on the top of my head, I noticed. Guess a helmet really is a good thing to have around.
I couldn’t draw a breath, between the squeezing and the dirt which was been blown into my nose and mouth like a tire pump full of powder. I tried to stand up, but nothing happened, which was the clue that I was lying on my side.
I didn’t remember hitting the dirt. I still don’t. Might have been reflex—you get pretty grabby for terra firma after a few days on the Line—or I might have been blown flat by concussion. There weren’t a lot of witnesses to sort it out.
I couldn’t keep my eyes shut against the dirt, because every time a close one went off it jarred them open again. So I squinted, gritty-eyed, trying to make sense out of the clouds of falling debris.
Did I say Ivan didn’t have much artillery? Well, that theory was dead and buried. What I should have said was, Ivan was saving his artillery.
For tonight.
Eventually, the novelty of being punched in the brain wore off. I forced my addled brain to move.
First Platoon and what was left of Second were out in the trenches, 200 yards to the east. I couldn’t see ‘em, but if they weren’t still under cover, they were beyond help.
Third, Weapons, and Headquarters were here, with me. We had some slit trenches and dugouts, but most of those were next to fixed structures like the mess tent. “Fixed” in the sense that although they could be rolled up and moving in half an hour, they stood out visibly while they were up. Whatever that tunneling vampire recon patrol had managed to report, they couldn’t have missed our command post tents.
And, indeed, the artillery did seem to be clustered right around where we were, rather than where First and Second were. But then, maybe it seems that way to everyone who’s being heavily shelled. It was my first real experience with it.
Maybe it was the concussion talking, but enough artillery might just make Hell look good.
Okay. We couldn’t reach First and Second, not through this. But anyone still alive was under some kind of cover, so we had pretty much suffered most of the casualties we were going to take. Probably. That’s what the book said.
Once the shelling lifted, the enemy would be coming through here. He couldn’t afford to use this much shellfire and not take ground with it. If he could, he’d have been doing it months ago, ever since we got here.
And the big push was coming through this piece of ground, no way around it. Once you’ve pulverized a place, it would be criminally wasteful not to go ahead and occupy it.
So okay. We had until the shelling lifted to get ready for the second act.
I wasn’t actually in cover; I was just prone. Why wasn’t I dead?
Most of the havoc was behind me now, to the west. I guess they figured they’d worked us over enough. I smelled like a shoe; a smoldering tire, one of the big donuts from a deuce-and-a-half truck, was lying to my left. It was torn up on the side away from me, ripped and puckered with shrapnel. I figured that’s why I hadn’t been killed from that direction.
I squeezed my eyes shut until they got gummy again and rolled my head to the right to see why the impacts from that angle hadn’t cancelled my ticket.
Everything was the same color, of flash-dried disturbed earth, so it took me a moment to identify the body of Grace, curled toward me in a way his joints really weren’t meant to go.
He opened his eye, which took a little while to focus on me.
His mouth moved. I couldn’t hear anything but jumbled underwater sounds.
But somehow, I knew what he was saying anyway. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m going to have to leave you guys…”
I could almost see the blast shadow with my unaided eyes. Some of the grass between us was plowed up, smoking from tiny scattered bits of black. But some of it was untouched.
I crawled with my belly scraping the ground—that tire wasn’t very tall—and got to Grace’s side pretty quick.
“Hang on,” I told him. “I’m not gonna let you fall.”
“That’s just what I told Simms,” he said, trying to smile. “Does it always hurt this much?”
“What hurt?” I said. “You’re gonna be fine. You just got it in a raw spot, that’s all…”
“Don’t…don’t lie to me, Sergeant. Please?”
I don’t kick puppies when they’re down, either.
“Aw…” I said instead. “Listen, take my hand, Grace. I swear I won’t let go.”
I fumbled his hand out from under his chest, but its fingers wouldn’t curl. Would it still work, to hold onto his hand when it wasn’t part of his mind anymore? “I gotcha, Grace. I’m here.”
“That’s…not so good for you, Mick,” he said. “Here’s pretty noisy…”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it beats the Other Place.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” he told me.
A near miss showered dirt over both of us. I wiped at my eyes with my free hand. His just got dirty.
“Grace…” I started to say. I don’t have any idea what I was going to say next.
Because he started sliding away from me, like he was on wet ice. He was dying, but he wasn’t going down—he was going out. Sideways, sort of. And a little bit upward.
His weight turned me half around, and I grabbed hold with both hands. I felt the ground under my stomach shift, dragging me along after him. I know I’m no Joe Palooka, but it was as if I didn’t weigh anything at all!
And then I was sliding over that wet ice myself. I guess it felt more like glass—it wasn’t wet, for one thing, nor cold. It felt open, if that’s the word. Like I was sliding over a wide-open gulf beneath my body, but I wasn’t going to fall. It just fell away deeper and deeper, till I felt if I ever let go, I’d never stop falling.
“Grace?” I demanded, and now it was easier to hear myself. “Where are you going?”
“I’m kind of curious about that myself, Mick,” he said back. “What are the rules for someone who’s done what I’ve done? No one ever told me. But wherever it is, there’s no pain. That has to be a good sign, right?”
“It ain’t life if there’s no pain, Grace,” I warned him.
“I think you’re right,” he said dreamily. “Mick, you’re not supposed to be here.”
“What are they gonna do, send me to Hell?” I snorted. I wasn’t so far into the afterworld that the dirt in my nose wasn’t still maddening.
“No,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. But it won’t be good for you. Listen, Mick, you got to let me go.”
“Horsefeathers,” I said. Or words to that effect.
The brightness was burning right through the dirt in my eyes now. I wiped my face on my sleeve, which is usually a bad idea, but it was pretty clean. I focused on a bit of bark—how far away had the nearest tree been, when the artillery landed?—on my cuff, and as I watched it dissolve, like a sugar cube, into a stain, then a faded memory of a stain, and then…just gone.
The place where Grace was going, dirt couldn’t exist. Which didn’t bode well for the mortal body I was kind of attached to.
Then my grip loosened. Without my willing it, my hands were slipping along Grace’s wrist. His uniform was dissolving, too, into a sort of oily vapor, and my hands couldn’t clamp onto the skin beneath.
Ever clap on a soap bubble? It’s over pretty fast.
Grace smiled, and both sides of his face were whole, as best as I could see. It was heartbreakingly brilliant by that point, coming from everywhere at once, and getting brighter still. I couldn’t really see him.
I fell.
On the way down, I saw a line of men in a trench. They were in brown uniforms, brown skin, brown hair, caked with dirt and mud. They’d just come up from underground.
They didn’t have much equipment: a rifle and a knife, maybe a grenade here and there. No canteen, no ration sack, no blanket. Assault order. Although even on an assault, we let you take a canteen with you. Combat dries the mouth.
An officer stood at the head of the line, between the men and the ladder out of the trench. He had a little table next to himself, covered with little glasses. As each man came up to him, the officer pressed a glass into his hand, and the man and the officer raised the glass together to his mouth with a slamming motion.
Blood ran down the sides of the dead man’s mouth. He was a vampire and so was the officer, whose brow ridge crinkled with amusement, framed by long, hairy bat ears. His eyes were red pits in gristle, his mouth a lipless cave of needles. He clapped the soldier on the back.
“NazDRAvyah!” he said, or something like it.
The soldier punched the air, jumped in place, and swarmed up the ladder. He looked as jazzed as though he’d just won the Sweepstakes.
My viewpoint shifted, as I continued to fall, and I saw along the line of men. It just kept going, back and back until it merged into a hole in the earth, from which more and more vampires were digging out their buddies.
* * * * *
So when I hit dirt, I was already aware of the scale of the problem.
When you see a sea of Russians coming at you, the Book has this sensible advice: be somewhere else! Nothing you can do will help. But the Force rarely chose retreat, even when it was the most sensible thing to do. After all, we weren’t trying to be the Sensible Scouting Force.
My uniform and equipment were clean and new, although I needed a shave. I hoped I hadn’t been gone too long.
The forward foxholes were full, with what looked like the entire company. I loped up, hands over my head, calling out my name in a voice that sounded tiny and choked to my aching ears. Also, after where I’d been, it was so dark I didn’t trust myself not to fall into the holes.
But Pruitt held off the trigger when he spotted me, and his Queens bray stopped anyone else from canceling my ticket. Can you bray and whine at the same time? If you’re from Queens, you can.
He and Lodge were behind one thirty-caliber machine gun, with Gnorfank handling the other without the benefit of a tripod, and Simms feeding him. Or he would be as soon as they went into action.
The wound in Simms’ neck looked like fresh, raw hell, but it wasn’t bleeding. He didn’t seem to mind. I wanted someone to slap a dressing on it anyway, but Grace had had the medical bag. It had faded into glowing fog somewhere between here and a Better Place.
Yes, every man had a battle dressing, a sort of prepackaged bandage dusted with sulfa powder in a glassine bag. I should have told someone to bind Simms up; it couldn’t be good for morale, if nothing else, to have his wound leering at everyone that way. But I didn’t, and then I couldn’t.
Higgins and Larzelere were down, wrapped in combat jackets at the bottom of a hole to the rear of our outpost line. Martini was with them, working his crystal ball for all he was worth. Weird lights flickered up out of the hole, which wasn’t deep enough and didn’t have overhead cover. Well, the ones on the front line did; that would have to do.
Someone had been thoughtful enough to dig a wide, deep hole halfway between Pruitt’s gun and Gnorfank’s. I scrambled over and swung in, keeping my shoe-pacs wide of Dave’s helmet.
So of course, I landed on Vatunska.
He was a little below ground level, turning in a circle on all fours. His spade-shaped hands and feet were tearing through dirt, ripping it apart with his nails. He’d made a little foxhole within a foxhole for himself, complete with a parapet of dirt.
“Sorry,” I said, even though I was a little peeved. He was either digging in way too deep—how was he going to see the enemy?—or he was trying to bug out. Or, of course, he’d just snapped.
Vatunska said something I didn’t catch, his face being underground. But Dave was handy.
“Yeah, he’s countermining,” Dave mused. “Countermining. See, if the enemy digs under us again, like they did before, Vatunska’s thinking he can like, detect the vibrations before the tunnel comes up. He gives us the word, we have a grenade waiting. S’a good idea.”
He crumbled a clod of dirt in his hand, rubbed it between his thumb and finger, and grinned in approval. An army led by Dave would be the easiest-going bunch in the world, true. But they’d still manage to think of most of the important things.
In my enforced absence, the guys had done what looked like a darn near perfect job of tightening our position after the artillery bombardment. Fighting holes were linked with scratches, which were as good as trenches as long as you were willing to crawl, with parapets made of tires and logs. Okay, half of them were dirt, but there aren’t but so many tires and logs. You can’t really use the smoldering ones.
We had, in all, four machine guns out of the six the T.O. called for, which may actually have been a small miracle. One bazooka, with a few rockets for it. One mortar tube, with a small fort of ammo crates around it. I stood up, which shows how tired I was—the crates were full of dirt, not ammo. Good.
And eighteen fit men, not counting myself. Barely enough to operate all the weapons.
Everyone sported bandages except Vatunska and Pruitt. Well, and me, I suppose. The transition from just outside wherever-Grace-was had even cured my headache.
But not my deafness. I was still talking far too loud. Dave jerked his head around when I spoke, the fastest I’d seen him move since Hassberg. And Simms, next to him, just about jumped out of his foxhole.
I guess if I’d been almost turned into a vampire, I’d be a little jumpy, too.
“They’re coming,” I said, clearly and sharply. And evidently a lot more loudly than I’d intended.
“Looks like a whole lot of them, but lightly armed. And, uh, drunk, it seemed like.”
Just then, the Russians confirmed my observation. “Urrah!”
They roared in pretty good unison when they came in sight of our line.
To the left and right of us was absolutely nothing, but these guys wanted our blood, not terrain. If you play chess to kill the other guy’s pieces, well, that can work, provided he doesn’t pull a trick on you.
One trick might have been to hold fire until they got so close we couldn’t miss. At about 300 yards, the vampires were visible from the waist up above the slope of the terrain. A spout of dirt went up behind them: our mortar, getting the range.
They roared “Urrah!” again, really getting their lungs into it.
They stabbed the air with their arms, their rifles, their claws.
Then they charged.
While they were roaring, Gnorfank dropped a mortar shell right in their front ranks. It helped that he could aim the mortar single-handed. Against a properly dispersed enemy, a mortar would drive a dozen men to ground, with two or three, if you were lucky, unable to get up again.
This one filled the air with arms and legs and flying Russians.
We opened up with the machine guns, walking our fire at waist level into the mass. Vampires who were hit fell back but didn’t go down; instead, they were crashed aside by the vampires behind them. They usually bobbled for a while before falling and getting trampled on. They’d probably be getting up later.
But their buddies were sure eager to get at our necks. They stumbled and fell, clawed their way up and lunged again even before getting their feet under them. In the moonlight, their eyes were blank hollows, dark as the pit. And I know: I’ve seen it.
Machine-gunning a section of them slowed them down as they stumbled and tripped over their wounded. So our guys swung their barrels back and forth, making sure to traverse each section of the enemy attack every so often. It slowed them, but it didn’t stop them.
I suppose the silver rounds did. Stop them, I mean. But I didn’t see any sign of it.
“If they’re immune to silver, now,” Dave stated from where he hunched over his gun, “this is going to be over pretty soon. Hey,” he said, looking quickly to his right, “who’s gonna throw the grenades?”
Everyone was busy shooting or loading, except the two guys with the bazooka, who hadn’t got a single rocket off yet. Larzelere pounded the helmet of Burgess from first platoon, indicating that the bazooka was loaded up, but Burgess stood there squinting over the sights, the wooden rifle-butt stock hard into his shoulder.
Whoosh! He’d found a target. An exceptionally dense part of the enemy front blew apart, less than a hundred yards away.
They started screaming. Keening, I guess you’d call it, like they were all in terrible pain.
Simms’ gun locked open, smoke pouring from the barrel and breech. He grabbed at the charging handle, yanked back his hand with a gasp. It was hot enough to draw a puff of smoke from his palm. He and his loader banged on the handle with a shovel and a rifle butt. It was locked halfway back, which meant the breech was neither open nor fully closed.
The gun was out of action, and the screaming dead were a few dozen paces away.
During the charge, I’d answered Dave’s question by finding a box of grenades. They were packaged already in cloth bandoleers, but with the cardboard cylinder still in place around each grenade. For safety.
I looped bandoleers over both arms, then started yanking other grenades out of their covers. I looked up, and it was time. It had been time several seconds ago.
I threw, recovered, and threw again. I wasn’t following through or going prone, because I had to get as many grenades thrown as possible. I was using my arm, but not my back or hips.
Which was why, as I was releasing my third grenade, the first one went off too close.
A shock and a bang, and Russians were flung sideways. Immediately after, it felt like I took a baseball bat to the forehead. My helmet spun away, and the shock knocked me back, but our improvised trench wasn’t wide enough for me to fall down. I just rebounded and threw again, harder this time.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
There was so much dirt in the air that I couldn’t see, but there wasn’t any wrong direction to throw them except left and right. Sweat streamed down my face—no, wrong smell, this was blood—stinging my eyes and my chin, which had somehow acquired an open cut or two.
Everything was quiet except the roaring in my ears. Maybe we’d driven them off.
Gnorfank’s gun cracked off a string of shots. I popped my head (eye level only; I wasn’t planning to smell them), over the parapet.
I didn’t see what he was shooting at. I popped an illum into my flare pistol and sent it skyward.
Just as the white light bloomed, the battlefield cleared its throat, rumbling a loud, long roar:
URRRAH!
And a wall of heads rose over the crest of the ground.
There were infantry packed hip to hip for hundreds of yards across our front. It was that mob I’d seen before, on my way back from Grace. If they’d all been served by that one officer, they’d have been drinking since sunset. There weren’t many rifles in that bunch, but they ran like their claws were all they needed.
Well, fingernails. They hadn’t really grown claws yet.
Gnorfank started shooting at once. Tracers ripped out, spattering away from the ground or thumping hard into flesh. A thirty-cal gets about three rounds off each second, balurp-blurp-blurp, balurp-blurp-blurp, with pauses in between unless you want to burn out the barrel. That makes a hundred-round belt last about half a minute.
Gnorfank was hosing that thing left to right, right to left, rattling his shots into one continuous mechanical racket. He wasn’t going to be able to keep going very long without some kind of breakdown, but then, there were a lot of vampires out there. He was knocking ‘em down, too.
And I didn’t see any getting back up, which was a special miracle right there.
I tensed up as the thirty-second mark came and went. Simms was keeping the belts fed, one after the other without a break. An ammo can holds two belts; most of us had been carrying one of those cold, heavy mothers’ sons all the way across Poland, for just this occasion. Gnorfank could keep going for a while.
Pruitt hadn’t shot at the scouts, or whatever they were, when Gnorfank did. It’s always prudent to keep the enemy guessing about where your big guns are, until the last possible moment. Grenadiers and suicide squads just love machine-gun nests.
But the last possible moment had come and gone, in Pruitt’s (and my) estimation. He opened up with little pauses in between, like training says. He wasn’t reaping them like hay, the way Gnorfank did, but every burst hit something, and when they went down, they stayed down.
One thirty-ought-six bullet, like our rifles and machine guns fire, will smash a limb or bust up a chest pretty firmly. Until the vampire can heal it with his stolen blood, he was down, physically unable to fight even if his damned soul was still eager. Knock ‘em all down, and you can throw in a white phosphorus grenade or a well-aimed silver slug to finish ‘em off.
These guys, though, weren’t healing themselves. They just lay there, flailing around like a very healthy living guy who’d just been wounded.
Pretty soon, Simms and Gnorfank had cut down every vampire in front of their position. The ones on the flanks were still coming, running and yelling, of course, but they weren’t coming at us. Maybe they’d close in behind, later, but we had to survive right now before we worried about later.
I didn’t know where the mortars were, or what had happened to the line platoons. I tried to remember if I’d seen any other GIs on the way down from wherever it was; I thought I had, but if those had been Americans, they were a heck of a lot farther away than I’d have liked.
So all our hole had to stop the mob headed our way was Dave’s BAR and my Thompson, which rattled one long burst and choked off, dry. I grabbed Dave’s rucksack and turned it over; slanted steel boxes and BAR magazines tumbled out. He yanked the mag release lever, and his clip fell out; I clicked the new one into place and shoved it home. Dave pulled the bolt, let it go forward, and bam, he was back in action.
It wasn’t equal to the machine guns, of course. But then Vatunska popped up and started throwing grenades, from the sack he carried around his neck. He couldn’t take a gun with him under the ground anyway, so he had a lot of grenades. And arms that could tear through soil at a walking pace turned out to be darn near a cannon when it came to throwing grenades.
In between bursts, I heard shooting on our left, which was where I’d seen the other guys. So maybe we were holding, and the Russians weren’t going to get into our rear areas where they could tear up our cooks and clerks. Oh yeah, and the officers, too.
However, I didn’t hear anything on the right but URRRAH!
We shot the machine guns until their barrels glowed cherry-red in the night. I lofted flares between magazine changes for the BAR. After the air raid, I’d taken to carrying a whole musette bag full of flares. Some were red, which didn’t help the nightmare feeling of the battlefield at all. At least, it was a sort of violet-red.
Just when it looked like they would never run out of vampires, they did. They hadn’t come at us in a line; they’d rushed, so the fastest went down first and the slowest trickled up in ones and twos as their speed allowed. Those were easy; I saw one guy get hit by both machine guns at once, and needless to say he, in particular, didn’t get up again.
Gnorfank was bellowing for more ammo. Lo and behold, Niepogodzinski, a guy from First Platoon, came duck-shuffling over from the left of our line, bent double under belts and belts of beautiful brass bullets.
He dropped into Pruitt’s hole, and when he came out, he had fewer belts. I waved him by, then double-doubted myself and took one. I could poke the bullets out of their canvas sleeves and reload BAR mags with ‘em if I had time.
That still left Niepogodzinski with a cartload of ammo for Gnorfank’s gun. The troll himself was standing up out of his hole (it couldn’t have been troll-deep, not in the time we’d had), holding the machine gun in one hand and waving it around to cool the barrel. It was pouring steam, so he’d poured water on it, which was a quick way to eat some heat. Also, it made his own smokescreen.
Not that this crowd had shot at us, much. I remembered a few deep-red muzzle flashes as they charged. No more.
Were they long on vampires and short on bullets? How hard was it to make a bullet, anyway, if making a vampire was easier?
Sure, it’s easy in the short term. But that vampire’s got to feed, every three nights, like I said. That means either a dead guy every three nights, or a whole bunch of guys who are all woozy from lack of blood, all the time. Either way, it takes a lot of the living to support one bloodsucker.
Did the Red Army have a million guys lying around back there, making blood to feed ten thousand vampires? Or what?
The Strudels were aristocrats; they treated becoming Un-dead as a transcendent privilege. So they were careful who they turned. They’d had a whole training academy to see who could cut the grade after death.
Russia, on the other hand, was taking a less selective approach, as far as I could see. And from the noise coming from out of eyeshot, they’d done a whole lot less selecting than Austro-Hungaro-Roumania.
These guys, groaning in the dirt in front of our lines, were the worst vampires I’d ever seen. They didn’t get up when you shot them, even if it was in the foot. They just laid there and suffered.
Either they didn’t know how to use their blood to heal themselves…or they didn’t have any to use.
What happens to a vampire when he can’t feed? Does he starve to death? He’s already dead, so that doesn’t seem very likely. Does he just stiffen up and lie there, like the old guy who’d been in charge back in Hassberg? Or does he go berserk, trying like fire to get more blood any which way he can?
They’d fed these guys just enough blood to make them crazy.
And it wasn’t enough to heal their wounds.
It would have been a mercy to just set them all on fire. And if I’d had some gasoline, or a white phos, I might have. Not would have, might have. Because I didn’t hate these particular vampires anymore.
Vampires, heck. They didn’t even deserve the name. They were barely zombies, with guns.
Artillery boomed behind me. Good. Soon the left of our line was getting hammered by our guns. Although I couldn’t help thinking that the place we were bombarding wasn’t precisely where I’d heard the yelling earlier. I hoped we weren’t shooting at ghosts.
A vampire leapt into the hole to my right, Simms’ hole. I almost threw a grenade at him, but checked and went for my pistol instead. My other hand was full of bandoleer, and I guess I didn’t want to let go of it. The grenades were my life-line.
The vampire was too quick to stop. He grabbed Simms’ loader, whose name I don’t recall, and yanked his arm out to full extension, his fangs diving for the loader’s armpit. There’s a big vein there close to the skin.
He shook his head back and forth, working the wound open, and after one yelp the loader just sagged back into the hole, turning waxy. But he was still alive, and still in the way between me and the vamp.
Simms slammed the vamp back against the hole on my side, and I stuck the pistol against the back of his helmet. It rang like a hubcap when I shot him.
Simms was already facing front again, propping his rifle on the parapet to shoot. He hadn’t fixed his bayonet, but there was no time at all to chide him. A group of the Un-dead were coming straight at me, twenty yards away or less. The length of a couple of trucks.
I yanked out a grenade with one hand and pulled the cylinder off with the other. I straightened the pin, pulled it, let the spoon fly off, and stuffed the live grenade right back into the pouch I’d taken it from.
Then I hurled the entire bandoleer as far as I could toward the enemy.
I didn’t perceive any individual bangs, just a heart-stopping rumble. After the artillery barrage, it wasn’t all that shocking.
But it did, as I discovered when I was willing to stick my head up, shred everyone who was thinking of jumping into my hole, or Simms’ hole, or one or two others.
There was a nasty grunting sound coming from my left, blurred by concussion. I snatched up my Thompson.
Another vampire was choking Larzelere with one hand, while he snaffled at Larzelere’s arm with his teeth. He had a grip on his arm right by the elbow; the sleeve was streaked, but there wasn’t a lot of blood visible besides that.
Larzelere’s crucifix bayonet winked, unstained, from another vampire’s chest. This one lay unmoving right in front of his hole, where he’d taken the blade in his heart while his comrade grabbed Larzelere.
I couldn’t shoot without hitting Larzelere. I grabbed for my bayonet, a reflex, since I didn’t wear a sheath for one and hadn’t been issued a bayonet anyway. Officers weren’t expected to get close enough to stab the enemy.
Larzelere’s eyes were wide open in horror, or so I thought. It might have been hate. Because as the vampire slurped at his arm, Larzelere heaved on the vampire’s other hand, prying it free from his throat.
That shouldn’t have been any more possible than lifting a Ford six-by-six. These new-model vampires they were throwing in weren’t what the old kind was—they were kind of like the grease gun or carbine of vampires. Sort of like the old model but not really the same in a clinch.
So Larzelere’s motivation, never in question, was strong enough to get the hand free. And then, instead of trying to free the arm the vampire was feeding on, Larzelere bit the Russian in the neck.
He made horrible gurgling noises—Larzelere, not the vampire. The vamp’s flesh got even grayer than before. As he became aware of what was happening, the vampire tried to pull back, but Larzelere had his legs locked around the vampire’s waist, holding his mouth to the dead man’s neck. The vampire fell over, kicked out spasmodically with one leg, shuddered, and lay still.
Larzelere swayed drunkenly to his feet. He was stained down to his belt with the vampire’s stolen blood. His arm hung uselessly, and up and down it, there being hardly any sleeve left, his veins were collapsed and black, visible even in the moonlight. His jaws gaped open, teeth gleaming.
He caught sight of me.
I’d had my Thompson in my left hand, angled upward, while I’d fumbled for a bayonet with my right. I could have dropped the weapon into my hand and sawed him in two, but I don’t think he realized that.
He lunged, and I snapped down the gun, but he wasn’t lunging at me. He threw himself sideways, onto the vampire he’d speared. Onto his own crucifix bayonet, embedded in the dead enemy’s chest.
His eyes were misted with hate, but he had a smile on his face as he died.
* * * * *
A couple of men rejoined after the Un-dead wave attack. Niepogodzinski had to get back to First Platoon; I didn’t have any orders for them but to stay in touch with Martini, and if they had one of the mortars, I’d like to know about it.
Our weapons were failing from heat, dirt, and overuse. Well, so were we.
I ordered water all around. When nobody listened, I took a couple of canteens and went to all the holes.
Lodge was sucking on a green rag loosely tied around his neck.
“I thank you, Sergeant Murphy,” he said as I knelt, “but I’ve had sufficient water today.”
“It’s a new day, Lodge,” I said. “Way past midnight.”
“That’s so, sir,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “Much obliged, then.”
He took the rag out of his mouth, enjoyed a long swallow, and handed my canteen back.
“You gonna have enough for yourself, Sar’nt?”
“There’s a jerry can back at the…” It sounded pompous to say the C.P. “The big hole over there. As long as it ain’t gasoline, I’ll be fine.”
“It sure will keep you awake if it is,” he agreed. “Gets too quiet around here, Pruitt’s liable to doze off.”
“Or start talking,” I agreed. “Not that the enemy doesn’t know where we are.”
“Still,” he said, “there’s something to be said for quiet. If he don’t know where you are down to the inch, he’s gonna miss.”
“These guys aren’t shooting straight anyway, Lodge. They’re more of the get-in-close type.”
“Yep.” He flicked a bit of dirt from his rear sight with his thumb. “Doesn’t hardly seem fair.”
Well, that was a sporting way to look at it. “How’re you fixed for ammo, Lodge?” I said.
“Right much for now,” he said. “But another charge like that one, I’m gonna be in a way to dryin’ up. They need any more bullets over there with the thirty-cals?”
They were down to a couple of belts, which wasn’t many seconds in an overrun.
“They’ll manage,” I said. No need to weaken morale.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “It’s all under control, idn’t it?”
Now I thought he was mocking me. He read it from my expression.
“No offense,” he said. “I didn’t mean your control, Sergeant. Mine either. It’s the Lord who’s got his hand over us. Until He decides it’s our time, we’re absolutely unkillable. Don’t matter what that other fellow’s got over on his side.”
I’m an idiot sometimes. “And when He does?” I said.
“Your master calls you home, you better jump,” he said. “But I expect He’ll be understanding with those of us for whom it’s our first time.”
“Me, on the other hand,” I started to say.
“You know what’s awaiting for you,” he affirmed. “I imagine He’s gonna expect you to answer the roll with a quickness!”
I suppose He would.
“Well, I’m gonna make darn sure it’s Him calling and not some stranger. I have things I’m supposed to get done down here first.”
Lodge leaned back for a minute, though his hand was still curled around the outside of his trigger.
“Well, you know what they say,” he said. “It ain’t the bullet with your name on it you gotta watch out for. It’s all of those others addressed to “Occupant!”
I gave him the grin he deserved and moved on. Nothing was wrong with Lodge’s morale.
“Hey there, Sarn’t?” he called softly. “Want me to sneak up there an’ see if they’re coming again?”
“Yeah, Lodge,” I said. “Why doncha do that little thing.”
By the time I’d called half the guys together, leaving half to man the weapons, Lodge had vanished. I just hoped the vampires couldn’t smell him.
“How’s our ammo?” was the first thing I said.
“Not so good,” Martini groused. “If the pieces don’t jam, we can shoot off all we have left. Probably. But the thing is, sir, that ain’t gonna stop them. They come like that again, and they’re gonna run right over us.”
“Mortars and bazookas about the same?” I asked. They were. “We ain’t gonna stop ‘em again like we did before,” Dave put in.
“Mebbe there’s another way? Like sharpshooting instead of spraying.”
“Naw. Naw. That’s no good, Zwergbaum,” Pruitt said, smacking his gum. “If they was ordinary Joes, coming a few at a time all spread out, then yeah, fine. We’ll hold ‘em up. But since they’re crazy meat-eaters who think it’s chivalry and shining armor time, they’re gonna come like last time, in a big crowd, all at once. We can’t hit ‘em all before they get to us.”
“Mebbe we can like scare ‘em away?” Dave wanted to know.
Martini threw down his C-ration can in frustration.
“Aw, you guys are crazy!” he burst out. “They’re vampires, man. Every single one of ‘em. They don’t scare; they don’t flinch; they don’t even die when you shoot ‘em! We can shoot ninety-nine of ‘em and number one hundred’s gonna keep coming and biting until his buddies heal up and join ‘im. How the hell we gonna scare ‘em away?”
“Watch that kinda talk,” I sergeanted. “All it helps is the enemy.”
I needed to refocus everyone on what we could do, not what we couldn’t. Fortunately, Dave was thinking on the same lines.
“There ain’t nothing left on the front line between us an’ them,” he began with spread hands. “But back behind us, there’s Battalion, an’ Regiment, an’, an’ probably Division, I don’t know, way in the rear somewhere.”
“Listen, kid, no one’s copping out on this thing, y’understand?” Pruitt said. “You let a retreat get going an’ pretty soon you’re here all by your lonesome!”
“I didn’t hear you telling anyone we was staying to the last man!” Martini said.
“I ain’t tryin’ to stay to the last man, but if we go, we all gotta go together,” Pruitt said. “If it’s a last man kinda situation, I don’t want the last man to be me!”
“I’m not volunteering either—” Martini started to say.
“But,” said Dave, cutting over them, “if we did have more ammo, and some more guys, we could hold ‘em, right?” Dave said.
“Hell, I mean heck, we already did once,” Martini said. “Sure we could. But we ain’t got more guys an’ ammo, so we ain’t—!”
“Battalion’s got guys,” Dave drawled inexorably. “Battalion’s got ammo. They got an aid station, too, which is gonna calm everybody down if nothing else. An’ they probably got some vehicles, which…I dunno, gives us a lot more options?” he said, grinning.
If we did bug out, shifting our strength to a more defensible position, we wouldn’t move awfully fast on foot carrying machine guns and mortars. On the other hand, we wouldn’t live very long without them.
And then, too, although sixteen of us were still fighting fit, that left twenty more that were wounded to some extent. Grace, our medic, was dead, or at least gone, which left the job to anyone and everyone who wasn’t currently being bitten.
“First platoon,” I said, pointing. “How many wounded?” Niepogodzinski looked around, saw Burgess moving.
“Three. And three fit. But Kelly can walk, and I think Illston can stand up, if someone supports him. So we really only have to carry one man.”
Second platoon was down to Morin and Alberty, with four wounded, of whom only one could walk. Third was just about the same, two and three, while Weapons platoon had three men but no wounded. And HQ platoon had six, plus two wounded, one of whom was Gnorfank and therefore might still be able to carry a couple of men, or a mortar, baseplate, bipod and all.
We could therefore, just barely, move our wounded, though not quickly and not without risk to them. And we’d have essentially no one providing security during the move.
Was it worse, however, than staying put?
An officer maybe shouldn’t think out loud; it could make him look indecisive. But he can sure ask questions.
“We got hit by those underground guys,” I began. “Full-strength vampires. Then artillery. Then this wave of amateurs, drunk on blood—they can’t have all that much left.”
“Did they bite every man in the whole Soviet Union?” Dave wanted to know. “Because, y’know, they’re not gonna have enough blood to feed ‘em all if nobody’s left walking around living.”
“Forget feeding ‘em,” Pruitt cut in. “Who’s gonna make more little Russians? They’re burning up all their ammo to win this thing. After it’s over, hey, win or lose, there ain’t gonna be a whole lot of Russians left.”
“So what do they care?” Dave said. “The big brass are all Austrian anyway. They just hit the jackpot with this Russia thing, and they’re spending their loot with both hands wide open, like us on payday. No, worse. Like Gnorfank on payday!”
“That bein’ the case,” I emphasized, “they ain’t goin’ to stop till they’ve shot their bolt. Unless they’re completely outta guys, they’re gonna keep pushing. They gotta figure we’re just about outta gas over here.”
“We are just about outta gas,” Martini agreed. “I mean, they gotta know that.”
“We put a whole lotta them back in the dirt, though,” Dave said, gesturing at the moon-shrouded fields. This morning, it was a lake of grass. Now, it was patchy; there were a whole lot of places where the tall grass was matted down, places about three feet by six.
“They got more where that came from!” Martini piped up. Nobody gave him the stink-eye or anything, but our silence conveyed the message that his input wasn’t helpful. “Sorry,” he said. He went back to trying to tune in his crystal ball, which was really greasy by this time.
“They do,” I said. “They gotta have more. And after spending elite commandoes, a trainload of artillery, and a whole raft of guys, they ain’t gonna throw in the towel now. They’re gonna throw good money after bad. At us.”
“Awright,” I said, standing up to show the debate was over. “We’re moving out. One man carries a wounded man, fireman’s carry if he’s gotta, with stretchers only for the guys that absolutely have to have it, like gut and chest wounds.
“We have to keep four men free to cover the retreat. Two machine guns on security while the center pulls back, then set up the third gun and cover the first two while they pull back, one at a time. We can’t carry more ammo than those four guys can hump.”
“That’s not even close to being a problem,” said Dave. “We ain’t got the ammo to hump anyhow.”
“Well, see? We’re already solvin’ our own problems,” I said. “Food an’ water, dump it. There’ll be water at Battalion, and if not, there’s still plenty of streams. Martini, see how many arm and leg cases Gnorfank can carry. Load him up. Dave, check the head wounds, see if any of ‘em can be carried by one man. And Pruitt, go tell Lodge. He’s in front of the line.”
“Out there?” Pruitt goggled. “Sergeant, I thought you liked that Southern-fried swamp rat.”
“He’s quiet,” I explained, knowing it was a mistake. You aren’t supposed to explain; you just give your order. But the Force was different. “He’ll be okay. And what do you have to worry about? You’re the lucky man.”
Pruitt looked around at the other men, who weren’t especially worried about him. So he didn’t say anything, to my surprise, just scooted along toward his hole with his head ducked low. I watched him until I was sure he was getting up out of the hole again, not covering up and staying put. Maybe it was an ungenerous thought I had.
But he headed off into the night like he was supposed to, so I forgot about him for now and made sure we didn’t forget anything we could carry. Equipment isn’t everything, but without it, we’d have been ground into the mud twice tonight already.
The time came, and we waited. We waited ten minutes, then another ten. But Lodge didn’t come back, and neither did Pruitt.
* * * * *
Beyond a certain point, a man falls on his face and won’t or can’t move for any reason short of his leg being on fire, and maybe not even then. But well before that peak of exhaustion, he often shuts down to the point where he can’t answer questions and even responding to commands seems an unbearable mental burden. But he can still lift and carry things, and walk.
Vatunska offered to dig us a tunnel, but if there’s anything more fatiguing than carrying a man on your back, it’d have to be pulling him over uneven ground in the dark. Never mind that enemy counter-tunnelers could come at us from any angle, including up and down, and us with no warning until they were among us. My distaste for enclosed spaces didn’t have anything to do with my decision—it just wasn’t sound.
The night seemed to drag on for an extraordinarily long time. It was summer, so we ought to have had sunrise before six, anyway. We were somewhat north of where I grew up in New York, but surely we weren’t so close to the Pole that the sun wouldn’t rise in the east, eventually.
But it didn’t, though the stars faded out, and presently the machine-gun team out front signaled for me to come up. I laid down Heavey—he wasn’t, not especially—taking care not to lower him by his injured arm, and plodded as quick as I could up to the front of the column.
An American command post looks a little like a motor rally, with more trucks than tents and all kinds of little structures spread around. Workshop flies, like tents without walls, radio tents, cook tents, mess flies, stacks of crates and barrels, individual shelters and pup tents in somewhat-organized profusion. Often there are cages for the anti-reconnaissance hawks and sometimes basilisks in their double-walled enclosures, surrounded by barbed wire so Joe Snuffy doesn’t turn himself to stone looking for the latrine.
This had all that, plus the guidons for Baker and Charlie companies, 36th U.S. Infantry Division. We’d found the Texas Army.
And they were here in force, from the number of vehicles. The Jeep is what you see in the movies and papers—it’s easy to draw, and there are in fact quite a few of them. But although we’re the only army in history to put a hundred percent of its men on wheels, we don’t quite have enough Detroit engines to be a completely Jeep-borne cavalry force. So most of us still ride in trucks.
There were plenty of those, lined up in a motor pool and parked herringbone-file along a dirt road, with alternating trucks pointed outward left and right for easy deployment. Most had canvas shelltops to keep the men and their gear out of the rain, but there were the usual extras with antitank guns, antiaircraft clusters, or towed howitzers with beds full of shells.
What there wasn’t was a lot of movement.
I motioned the guys to get down, a move their burdens made welcome. I glassed the scene with my binoculars, but they’re not as much help at night as you’d think, as they cut down the brightness of what you’re looking at. You’re squeezing down the light coming off where you’re looking, so you can see more of it farther away, but you’re not actually making extra light.
I saw mortar pits littered with cardboard shell tubes and wooden ammo boxes. And I mean littered, heaped up all over the place. They looked like they’d been firing for hours.
Didn’t see any gunners, though.
Then I spotted a helmet, lying upside-down near the back of a head, and by interpolating the body I made out a guy sprawled against the farther edge of one of the mortar pits. An empty shell crate had fallen over his face, in a way that would have been seriously uncomfortable had he been alive.
Battalion did, indeed, have plenty of supplies. What it didn’t have was plenty of people.
If they’d bugged out, they would have taken the trucks, wouldn’t they? How scared would they have to have been to have run out on foot, leaving the dead and all their gear—and their trucks!—behind?
What could they have seen, back here behind the lines, that could scare them so bad?
After our night march, shelter and care for the wounded was our top priority. Water after that, and we’d have to put out our own security if the CP was abandoned. But it didn’t seem like supplies were going to be a problem.
I looked up, seeing not a single star nor ray of daylight.
One tent was much like another, but the Red Cross stood out fine even by moonlight. I waved our column over that way, set the machine gun up on the right to cover our approach, and went back to pick up Heavey again.
He was awake by this time.
“Hell, I can walk, Sarge,” he said. “Just get me up on my feet, would yuh?”
He’d been trying to do a sort of one-handed pushup, but his knees weren’t bending far enough to get them under him.
I put his good arm over my shoulder and struggled to my feet, dragging him up. I bent to pick up my rucksack and equipment. It pressed me to the earth. I would have stayed down there, and might be there yet, if Heavey hadn’t been watching. But it doesn’t do to let the men see you struggle.
The tent was on a gentle rise, probably for drainage, although it hadn’t been ditched or entrenched. Often it isn’t for a few days after arriving at a new position.
The flaps were secured, but there wasn’t anyone in the tent. Some of the cots were overturned, and others were messy, but empty.
I opened a reefer cabinet reeking of kerosene from the attached generator. It was plenty cold inside and almost full of bottles of chilled whole blood. So the vampires hadn’t been through here.
What the Hades…
Gnorfank hit the doorframe with his shoulder and brought one whole side of the tent down. We got it up again quick; he even helped. His wounds were scabbing over already, and he was greener around the fangs than before, but what could we do? We didn’t have any troll blood.
Burgess and Niepogodzinski had set up their gun in a premade sandbagged pit that someone in the Battalion command post had dug, cursing all the while. No, I didn’t see him do it. Some things are just assumed.
We still had a few guys missing from the company, and a whole lot of guys missing who should have been manning the CP. A battalion command post usually accumulates as many men as one of its line companies. And since trucks don’t work too well further forward, they end up with a lot of the heavy weapons, too. I wanted to find those missing men, and I could really use those missing weapons, although I wasn’t sure how much use an antitank gun was going to be against massed vampire infantry.
That was a phrase I never thought I’d need. If this kept on, we’d all be calling it MVI. We might even have a solution to it.
On the left, we could see a long way, even by moonlight. Nobody was sneaking up on us from there, or from the front across those fields. On the right, there was a hill; more of a gentle rise, actually, but it blocked line of sight. I saw treetops beyond it.
I didn’t have enough men to send a scout to find the rest of the CP staff, or ascertain the situation on our right. But since my input was going to be extremely straightforward if they came again, (“See them vampires, soldier?” “Yes, sir.” “Shoot them!” “Okay, sir!”) I did have one guy I could spare. Me.
The country on the right hadn’t had a bunch of crazy Scouts holding back the enemy. The ground over the rise was churned into ruin by thousands of boots, spreading back to the west. A lot of them had dug furrows, as though they were dragging one or both legs.
And there were bodies, still faintly wriggling, dropped in the mud seemingly at random. They wore long jackets and blanket rolls over their shoulders, like something from the Civil War. Most didn’t have helmets and a lot didn’t have rifles. Russians, then.
I saw some tight rows that had been mown down, off toward the Russian lines, but closer in it was just ones and twos, as if our return fire had fallen apart.
Some of the vampires were missing arms and legs, and some were even more fully disassembled. So they hadn’t bought anything cheap.
About a thousand yards off (I really did need to be getting back), I saw a weapons carrier, one of those half-truck-half-tank vehicles that could conquer mountains or roads with equal ease. This one had a quad-mount antiaircraft gun in back, which explained the blown-apart vampires downrange. But why wasn’t it still in action? Had they run out of ammo?
Airplanes require a big bullet to bring them down; the AA guns wouldn’t use the same caliber as our weapons. If they were dry, there wasn’t much I could do for them.
Which was the case anyway, I saw as I got closer. A few guys in green coveralls, which is what the Army issues when you don’t rate a combat jacket, were sprawled around the half-track, dead and drained. The cloth around their wounds was chewed off, as if the vampires craved every scrap of their victims’ blood.
So maybe they hadn’t run out of ammo. They’d run dry another way.
I had good fields of vision all around, but it was still night, and the moon wasn’t much help. So I approached the wreck cautiously, wasting time I really couldn’t spare.
But it’s a good thing I did, because one of the dead GI gunners rolled his head to the front, pushed up on his dead arms, and got to his feet.
Collapsed veins made a Martian patchwork on his skin. His sleeve hung in tatters where they’d bitten it open. The inside of his elbow was matte black, too dry to gleam any more.
I now had all the information I needed on the state of our right flank. It was hanging in dead air. The only Americans there were now the enemy.
The guy started forward. He shuffled like a man with casts on all four limbs. His head jerked around from side to side, rolling up and down. I don’t think he could see too well.
But somehow, he knew where I was.
He let out a dry, rattling moan, and his buddies started to rise. “C’mon, fella,” he rasped, as though his throat were as dry as sandpaper. “Gimme a nip. I’m dry as a Kentucky courthouse. Help a guy out, won’t ya?”
I ran for it.
These fellows, like the Russians we’d cut down earlier, were severely underperforming Un-dead. They moved as slow as a blood-drunk Old One, but without the purpose or focus. Maybe their brains were as blood-starved and spastic as their bodies.
Probably so, actually. Because if any one of them had had some presence of mind, they could have cut me down with those fifty-cals from a thousand yards.
And yes, I was leading them toward my own people. I jinked south, but, by then, they were barely visible. I wanted to stick around and see if they changed course, away from the Scouts, but I’d been gone too long already. I didn’t want to come back and find my guys in the same state this gunner crew was in.
They found me, eventually. By which time I was back among the living, ready to make them the dead.
Which we did.
We didn’t have a tank or even a tank destroyer, but one of the abandoned trucks had an Anson projector on it, and Dave had gotten it working. Ever since his trip to the dwarf Valhalla, he’d been an absolute wizard with machinery.
The manual says it’s impossible to artificially duplicate sunlight.
And at the time the manual was written, that was probably true.
But we just never leave a good thing alone, us Yanks. And once we had a source of artificial sunlight, there wasn’t any reason to limit it to the brightness or intensity of the actual Sun.
Dave hit the contact switch, and Gnorfank muscled the lamp body onto the approaching vampires. A rod of unbearable brilliance flashed into being, tying the Anson lamp to a suddenly phosphorescent section of hillside. It was not just illuminated; it was so brightly lit up that light shone from every crack and pit in the soil itself. It was as if we’d turned on a fire hose of light and filled up the hill, so much that light came bursting out of the saturated ground.
For all I know, maybe that wasn’t even a metaphor. Gadgets get crazier every day in this war.
You hardly ever see what the Sun does to a vampire. They’re usually not that stupid or desperate for blood. Whatever the blood hunger does to their minds, fear of the Sun is even stronger.
Bring the Sun to them, on the other hand, and it’s not even like a stream of bullets, or water from a hose.
It’s like a razor blade a mile long.
The beam crosses them and moves on, of course, like a feather flicking over their surface. And the clothes it illuminates are unchanged. But the skin darkens as fast as the uniform brightens. And after the beam is off them, the clothes go back into the dark, but the skin is burning like someone spilled a candle.
That is, if the inside of that candle was full of gasoline.
It was a blue fire, so bright it hurt, fountaining up and blowing out at the sides from the neck, sleeves, even around the belt. It was a balloon of blue-green fire popping all at once, but then continuing to roar into the sky as the body shrank beneath it.
And every vampire who so much as touched the beam went up like a blue volcano. The night was bright as day, under a midnight sky.
Behind and to the sides of the large group which caught the beam, other vampires grabbed their smoking faces, set alight just by looking at the lamp.
Gnorfank went back over the group again after that first pass, pausing the light on anyone who seemed to need it. The dark piles of rags barely twitched, but more flame bloomed up from their depths.
Then he swept it after the ones he’d missed, frying them like ants under a magnifying glass. There wasn’t a lot of room to run away, but they couldn’t have done that very effectively anyway, being thoroughly blinded.
“Izzat all of ‘em, then?” Gnorfank asked politely. “Cause I can’t see a bloody fing anymore.”
“Yeah, yeah, you got ‘em, Tex,” Dave whooped. “Better save the batteries, though…”
He fiddled with wires, and eventually the light stopped.
* * * * *
Naturally, the light gave away our position to the enemy’s next wave. They all headed for us.
You hear a lot about “first wave,” “second wave,” and so on in LIFE and LOOK. It’s true that beach invasions, like Anzio and D-Day, have their invaders staggered in waves. And yes, we did launch assaults on the Western Front in the First War in waves of men, leaving the trenches every ten minutes.
But no one had done that here in this new war since the very beginning. We have a lot more mortars and machine guns this time around; we can pretty well chop up a wave completely before the next one hits.
Instead of waves hitting a beach, one after the other, a modern attack comes at you like a rising tide; a slow sheet of water trickling around hills and woods, filling up ditches and streams, gradually getting deeper everywhere at once, no matter how hard you bail against the tide.
The first Russian attack had been a no-kidding actual human wave, packed close together and yelling their heads off, with the ranks in the back utterly unable to use their weapons without hitting the guys in the front. I guess they thought their buddies’ chests would protect them from bullets.
They weren’t wrong, come to think of it. But we’d had just barely enough bullets.
Would they try it again? That was a colossal amount of men they’d poured into our positions. Did they have the bodies, boots, and rifles to roll the dice a second time?
Armed with the weapons from the CP, we might have enough bullets to stop them a second time. If we could find enough fingers to pull the triggers.
Martini had scrounged another .50-caliber machine gun from our dead. He didn’t dare go near the enemy; they were dead, yes, but many were still moving, and might be more dangerous than they appeared. Besides, all they seemed to have was bolt-action rifles, inferior to our weapons, and not many of them.
Thinking back on it now, what they did have was lots of ammunition for those rifles. It would have been helpful to have it, but looting the hundreds of not-quite-dead would have been risky. I couldn’t afford to lose any more.
Gnorfank hefted a fifty-cal, which was big even for his trollish bulk. It wasn’t intended to be fired from shoulder level, hip height to a troll. So Simms fed him, unkinking the belt of massive thumb-sized bullets as they snaked out of the ammo can.
Dave had the Anson lamp. He’d loosened the rusty gears so he could swing it freely, and sported a pair of Petro Warfare goggles so dark red they looked black. He was grinning like a fiend.
We took Martini’s fifty into our hole, with Vatunska shooting. His big flat fingers weren’t so good at linking ammo belts together on the fly. I, on the other hand, had fingers like ballerinas.
We gave Vatunska all our grenades, too, for when they got close.
If they got close.
So when they came at us again, we were ready. We could have stood off another thousand vampires.
Which made it a real shame that they led with dragons this time.
We heard the creaking of their armor plates before we heard their hisses. You can’t really breed a dragon with hide thick enough to stop a cannon shell; for that, you have to hang armor on ‘em, in a complicated overlapping pattern like one of King Arthur’s knights, although they wouldn’t like the comparison. Dragons being fire-aspected (or air, but that kind’s far too fragile to use on the ground), they don’t like cold iron. But aluminum, brass, bronze, anything that doesn’t occur in nature, they tolerate just fine.
None of which are near as tough as steel, but as I may have hinted once or twice, the world wasn’t perfect.
Dave lit ‘em up before they were near close enough for the rest of our weapons.
The book says, correctly, not to open up at long range, because it’s a lot harder to hit the enemy once they flop down on their bellies. Best to wait until your mediums are in range, then rack up the score in the few seconds before they all hit the dirt.
But they hadn’t hit the dirt last time, so maybe the book needs another page.
Blue candles lit in the distance, flickered, and even ran around a little. But he couldn’t get ‘em all; the front ranks cast their protective shadow over the rest.
The Russians had their flamers about 100 yards apart, which is tight-packed for dragons. Each snarled and snapped around itself, its snaky neck flexing, trying to reach the handlers holding long poles chained to the collar behind their heads.
Between them, though, was another thousand or so shambling zombies. They were lit up well enough from the side-splash of the Anson to see plenty of details. This bunch had even fewer rifles, and most of them weren’t even in uniform. Not many helmets, either, which let me see through the binoculars that the taller ones had long hair, and most of the civvy outfits sported skirts.
They were women. They’d vampirized their own women.
I felt a sick chill I hadn’t even experienced when I was in actual Hell. Even on the Devil’s own battlefield, this was wrongness squared and cubed.
And the shorter ones? Children. Boys and girls both. Of course. They were eating their seed corn anyway, destroying their women to win this war. Why not use up the next generation, too?
There really wasn’t going to be anything left of Russia after this war, no matter which side won.
I was gobsmacked. I shouldn’t have been surprised by evil at this late date; generally, it’s not very inventive. But I walk into it anew every time.
I put the binoculars down. I carefully suppressed my desire to throw them away, far away, with all the strength my curdled guts could give me. Then I sounded off, telling everybody what they’d be facing.
Because I didn’t want them freezing when they realized who they’d be shooting at. Gnorfank, maybe, would have been all right, but I’d never seen him around a lady, even a lady troll. Maybe he had the same reflexes as the rest of us concerning the fair sex.
The rest of us could use a little time to adjust to this latest wrinkle in the war with Hell.
One of the dragons heard me and burped up yellow fire. He swung his crocodile-head around to the front and opened his jaws, showing me teeth smoldering like coals.
I jeered back. Why not? He already knew where I was.
This fanned his wrath a little more, so he hissed, flicking a burst of flame at me. It also meant his mouth was wide open when Dave put a long ripple of BAR slugs down his soft black throat.
It went ape, flailing and bucking its handlers right off the ends of their poles. Then it was free to lash and slash in a rough circle of carnage, trying to bite the thing that was tearing its throat out, or claw it or stab it with its jaw spines. The vampires backed up behind the dragon, unwilling to go around it because of the Anson lamp.
But on either side of it, the other dragons bounded, like eager locomotives. Another one chuffed flame, and this time it licked over our heads as everyone flinched. The sudden gap in our shooting stung my ears.
We got the fifty back in action, feeling its noise on our faces and hands. Vampires dropped this way and that. The fifty-caliber bullet is a plane-killer or a truck-killer; back in the first war they used it to stop the old-fashioned tanks they used back then. When it hit a man, or a woman, it took limbs off and knocked the body into the air.
I pointed out a dragon that was getting too darn close, and Vatunska swung the smoking barrel, just as the gun gave a CALUNK and stopped.
Jammed!
The wash of fire over our heads took our attention off the gun for a second. Martini yanked on the charging handle, but it wouldn’t budge, even when I wrapped my hands over his.
If a cartridge hangs up in the breech, you can usually pull the handle to snap it out again. But if the extractor, or some other working part, pinches the brass cartridge case when it’s partway into the breech, you need tools to get it out.
Martini smacked the bolt with the heel of his hand, which sometimes works, but no go.
We usually keep the tools (asbestos mitten, barrel wrench, hammer) in a bag near the tripod, or actually slung underneath it. Of course, it wasn’t there.
Which is why I was bending over when the dragon gathered itself and leapt its own body length to belly into our hole like DiMaggio sliding into home.
I was face down, bent double, with my knees on either side of my head and ten tons of sulfur-stinking dragon flesh on my back. Vatunska was behind me, so I couldn’t straighten my legs, but I kicked anyway, because being buried alive is one of my personal nightmares.
My leg went straight, and I fell over into the space it had filled.
Vatunska wasn’t there.
I could roll over in the gap between dark red belly scales and dark brown earth. Brass rattled beneath me with a jarringly cheery sound. Some light fell into the hole, gun flashes let in when the dragon raised his head. Then it was very bright and rather hot, because he was heaving flames at some poor slob.
I saw a pair of boots against the other end of the hole, way too far apart. That was Martini, then, not Vantunska, who was barefoot. He, Martini, had been behind the gun, whacking on that stubborn handle, when the dragon hit us. It had crunched him against the dirt like a car running over a cat.
I couldn’t wrestle the Thompson off my back. I had a Colt pistol, and a jump knife, both of which were untested dragon-slaying instruments but with a high likelihood of uselessness. And as soon as he shifted his weight, one spike-clawed foot was probably coming into this hole with me.
Of course, there was also a fifty-caliber tank-killing machine gun in the hole with me. The tripod was bent, and the barrel might be, also. But if I pulled down the triggers…
They say the belly armor is lighter on these things. Time for a little experimental science.
The trigger wouldn’t even move. I remembered, as though it were a long time ago, that it was jammed. That’s why I’d been rummaging for tools, and why Martini…
The dirt trembled.
The dragon above me roared, shaking the ground, but the trembling had come first. One of my boots dropped into a sudden sinkhole, buried in an instant under bright cartridge cases. My back swayed.
The hole was crumbling away below. I could feel it sagging left to right, as though layers were being scraped away under the surface. A chunk of clay mud the size of my chest dropped to the side, revealing sky, and I wriggled through the gap, feeling the dragon’s weight on my back. I was, not for the first time, grateful for my skinny build.
The dragon’s front legs dropped into the widening hole. It reared, hissing, trying to get its middle up even as its hindquarters fell even deeper. Clods of dirt held together by grass roots tilted and dropped into a yawning, but not very wide, crater in the earth.
A shower of soil sprayed up, and Vatunska’s head popped out a yard away, grinning like a very satisfied mole. He curled his hand at me, like he was holding a cup. I realized he was giving me as much of a jaunty thumbs-up as his dwarfy hands could manage.
“Countermining!” he rasped, dirt scraping in his teeth.
The dragon paddled like a dog, desperate to remain above ground as his own weight dragged him down. One yellow eye turned to Vatunska.
Just before its body disappeared into the dirt, the dragon’s long neck snapped downward and bit a huge chunk out of the ground, right where Vatunska’s head was. I had a dreadfully clear view; there was no way he’d survived.
The ground kept collapsing as the dragon vanished out of sight. Vatunska had dug one Hell of a pit, or else he’d carved the top off an underground chamber that was already there.
Another dragon reared up its head, spewing fire in a deadly arc. Men ran ablaze, flailing and dropping with the same sick finality the vampires had, back when we lit them up with the Anson lamp so long ago.
Wasn’t it still the same night?
The last bazooka team lined up on the dragon, but a little fellow on its back yanked on the barbed-wire reins and got it to turn its head around just as Niepogodzinski slapped Burgess on the helmet to signal the rocket was loaded and ready to fire. The dragon belched blue shimmering waves at them, but before their clothes could ignite, the bazooka exploded.
Parts flew every which way.
The dragon reared through the flames, breasting aside a piece of the bazooka tube with its curved scales. The imp on its back shrieked and covered its face, but it still got scorched. It didn’t burn, though.
I may be giving the impression I was just standing there with my face hanging out while the dragon crashed through my men. Well, I was shooting the Thompson the whole time, trying for its eyes or the little bastard on its back, but I wasn’t accomplishing anything more than if I had been staring slack-jawed at the carnage.
Gnorfank reared up over a burning truck body, carrying a long green case of bazooka rockets. He saw what had happened to the crew and threw the box down hard.
It split, tail-first. But then his head came up, yellow eyes narrow slits in his brown-green froggy face. He grabbed a rocket in each hand.
I yelled to give him some cover, and he yelled, too, words I didn’t understand but pretty much got the gist of anyway. The dragon looked to me first, puffing a blast which curled upwards, as fire does, just a few yards short of my position.
Some position; I wasn’t in a hole or behind cover. I wasn’t even crouching. But he’d under-corrected the range, and I was still alive, still shooting.
Then the dragon spotted Gnorfank, but by the time he swung his snaky neck back down to take aim, it was too late.
Howling some trollish battle cry, Gnorfank jabbed the two rockets into both sides of the dragon’s neck, right where it merged into the chest. The three-pound shaped charges in the nose, carefully angled to cut through a tank’s armor, went off as soon as they hit bone.
He angled them downward toward the lungs, which is where the dragon’s fire lives. I know because it blew out, and up, and over both of them, rising high above the dragon’s head and showering down in countless yellow-bright fragments of spinning, flaming ruin.
The wings flapped loose, each going its own way, burning. I saw the smoking saddle hit, empty, a hundred yards away. There wasn’t much smoke, for some reason. I guess it burned too hot.
Gnorfank lay on his back, minus an arm and a leg. The blood which ran from his shoulder stump was on fire.
There wasn’t much left to burn in the center of the black space where the dragon had been. Just some gray-black bones, smoking with heat but apparently not very flammable.
Among the weights hanging from my belt was a canteen. As like as not, in the Scouts as in most front-line outfits, it would have been full of wine (in the Tyrolian Alps) or plum-brandy slivovitz (in Poland) or vodka, in the Russian-infested part of Poland we were, as far as I knew, in now. But fortunately, it was a while since we’d hit town, so it was just water.
I splashed it on the wounds, and it steamed, which looked as though it must hurt. But it also put the fire out.
“Sarge! Sarge!” somebody cried. I saw a figure waving in the smoke, but I couldn’t place the shape. I shambled over, my feet dropping and stumbling over unexpected dips.
It was Simms. He was holding the company crystal ball.
“They’re telling me I have to authorize them, but they can’t hear what I’m saying,” he said. “They said to get an officer! Where’s Martini?”
I labored to catch my breath.
“He’s not available,” I said, which was true enough. “Who’s on the ball?”
“I don’t know!” Simms said. “All I see is a mouth.”
Well, you have to hold these things gingerly if you want to get a good picture. I took it.
Mil-spec crystal balls are HEAVY. I almost dropped it.
I saw a face swing upside-down inside the crystal. Okay, it was too close to my eyes. I held it out. That made my arms tremble, so I put it down, kneeling beside it.
Something moved on the ground next to me. Both hands were holding the ball, so I groped for my Thompson.
I pulled my sight back from the weird world inside the crystal ball, focused on the movement. There was plenty of firelight to see by.
It was an arm.
A greenish-brown arm, glabrous like frog-skin, with warts and spots and a partial coating of carbonized olive-drab cotton serge sleeve material, Army, summer weight, for the wearing of. It had four fingers dug hard into the disturbed soil, and even as it closed into a fist, dragging itself forward a couple of inches, the stub of the thumb poked new bone out through the muscle.
Skin followed the bone, decently hiding it from the public. A thumbnail started to form, even as muscle tissue slowly inflated the skin behind it.
I didn’t shoot it, because not all green-skinned regenerating swamp monster cannibals were on the side of the Enemy. This might have been one of ours.
The arm patiently, stubbornly crawled its way over to Gnorfank, who was trying and failing to sit up with only one arm. From the other side, another object was heaving itself up, flexing, then subsiding again, painfully making a few pathetic inches of progress. The leg, of course.
They weren’t going to be able to go back to where they belonged, of course. We’d learned that when we learned how to kill, or at least make harmless, the Enemy’s trolls. Stick a lopped-off part back in place soon after they were removed, and you might have a chance to smooth it back on. But let a new arm or leg start to bud in the place it came from, and the orphan limb wouldn’t bind. Eventually Gnorfank would grow a new arm, and the arm, equally damaged, would grow itself a new troll.
It wouldn’t be Gnorfank, of course. Arms don’t have brains, and the brain it grew wouldn’t know much of anything. But eventually it could learn to walk and talk like any newborn; usually the parent troll raised his buds until they could fend for themselves. If he lived, and trolls were pretty difficult to completely kill, Gnorfank might be in for a spell of fraternity leave. Or paternity leave. Whatever it was.
It was a much less destructive form of horror and madness than the others on offer, so I watched them crawl for a while. Would they stick in place or fall off, and did Gnorfank get to do anything about it?
But the ball was shouting distorted nonsense, and I still had a job to do.
Once I got it at the proper distance, the picture and sound both came into focus. Upside-down, yes, but I’ve got long arms. At least the sound was right side up.
“ARE YOU ON GRID SQUARE 0347, MAP SECTION FOUR? JUST ARE YOU, OR ARE YOU NOT?” demanded Col. Clancy, the division artillery commander. Savaldi’s boss. Shouting through a crystal ball doesn’t help; the magic involved pushes everything toward a portentious whisper, no matter how loud it is. But like all redlegs, he was three-fourths deaf.
“Yes. Yes, we are,” I said. A grid square is a thousand yards wide, so I was pretty sure we were.
“Who is this?” he shouted, although the ball was damping him down to a roar now.
“Murphy, acting captain, Spiritual Scouting Force,” I said. If he wanted to assume that meant I was a lieutenant doing a sergeant’s job, I wasn’t going to correct him. “We’re where First Battalion command post used to be. They’ve all had it, though. Bugged out or KIA.”
“First Battalion of the 142nd?” he wanted to know.
I recalled the notation 1/142 on, well, everything that stood still long enough to paint it the last time the command post was in decent shape.
“Affirmative,” I said.
“And they’re all gone? You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Some of them were still moving, or had been, but they were nevertheless gone, in the sense of being available to the Army.
I remembered I was talking to an artilleryman, and winced.
“But we’re here,” I added. “There are still friendlies on this position.”
“Can you hold?” he said.
I was going to lie my head off, but the truth must have shown on my face.
“Listen, Murphy,” said Clancy, “our prayer nets and counterspells are overwhelmed and not responding. There’s too much enemy stuff all concentrated in one spot, right where you are. They’re throwing everything they have at us.
“But I’ve relocated both batteries of 155s; they don’t know where we are, and they’re not spoofing us yet. So I’ve got at least one very, very big barrage in store before we have to move again.”
“There must be tons of enemy assets right near where you are. If you can spot them, tell me where they are. I got every kind of shell you can imagine up here. I can load flare and white phosphorus shells, pull the delay trains and burst ‘em on the surface, or use V.T. and soak the ground for a mile around. I’ll turn that grid square into Hell itself and give ‘em all a nice taste of home before they go. But I only get one try before we have to relocate.
“So you tell me. Can you see any target worth obliterating from the face of this Earth?”
There weren’t any more dragons moving within my sight, and the smoke coverage wasn’t thick. I was pretty sure there weren’t a whole lot of zombies moving around, either.
I held up my binoculars—broken, of course. I squinted my Mark One eyeballs against the sting of smoke.
What I did see was a few GIs, most still, but some moving. Nobody was standing up, possibly out of habit, because I didn’t hear any gunfire, either.
Or much of anything else. Maybe I was deaf, or maybe it really was quiet. I did hear crackling flames, though. Everywhere.
A man walked upright into view, coming out from behind a burning dragon. The firelight made him a statue of bronze and gold highlights, but I’m pretty sure he was wearing glossy black leather and golden buttons. No silver for these boys—that was strictly for the living. I’d seen what the Enemy’s high command liked to wear, back in Hassberg. Count Dracula fashion minus the opera cape, with medals—medals!—and sashes, and a sword at their sides. Polished riding boots, big flared collar, epaulets…oh, he was a living doll, all right. Ready for his closeup. He was all set to just get right up out of the opera seats and take the stage.
He waved his hands over his head like he was conducting an orchestra. My guts curdled from here, most of a mile away. The night rippled.
And the Russian Un-dead we had taken such pains, lost so many men, to kill, got back up slowly, hesitantly, to their feet.
One of us, I have no idea who, took a shot at the vampire wizard general. He had a big head on small shoulders, so maybe it was Liebgott. It couldn’t be Pruitt…he wasn’t jerking his head around in all directions, he wasn’t talking a mile a minute, and hadn’t we lost Pruitt on patrol? I couldn’t quite remember.
The general hissed, growing in height and turning yellow-gray in his wrath. He gave a command, pointing claws at the sky for emphasis.
The re-reanimated Russians all stumbled in the shooter’s direction. There were more of them than I thought; it was like the leaves were getting up off the sidewalk and converging on one spot.
As it was ordered, so it would be done, the vamp seemed to conclude. He turned away from Liebgott or whoever, facing now the still-burning dragon beside him. He curled his arms at his waist and lifted, hauling the whole truck-sized carcass onto its feet.
A gray, dead eye rolled in its blasted socket. The dead dragon wheezed, coughed embers, and struggled, finding its feet.
It whuffed flame and sparks out of two deep holes in its sides. It was the same one Gnorfank had killed.
Had killed himself, almost, to kill. Avenging Martini and Vatunska, among others of us.
I saw the theatrically gesturing figure in black through a sudden haze of red. You know what they say about elves and our rages? The silent burn, the slow killer? That you’ll never see us mad, but we won’t do anything else, not sleep or eat, until we get revenge? That it consumes our souls?
I hadn’t thought it was true.
Elder vampires were as different from these stumbling wrecks as we were from regular dead guys. They had all kinds of powers. Other vampires did their bidding like robots. Plus, they were impossible to kill, if they still had even one drop of blood.
With all that, he hadn’t risked showing himself until the battle was just about over. He didn’t have the guts of the least of my GIs.
And now he was showing up when all the shooting was done, to collect all the winnings he hadn’t even anted up for? To pile his hoard of stolen blood still higher, stolen from brave men?
No. Not just no, but Hell no.
Liebgott, or whoever it was, raised his head out of the dirt. He turned his head, and I saw it wasn’t Liebgott, it was Simms. Then he brought up his rifle to his cheek, and shot.
He missed. After all that pounding, I bet he couldn’t even see straight, let alone aim. But he was still trying.
I still didn’t want to let him die. But even more, I wouldn’t let him be a snack for a coward who hid in a hole.
“Clancy, this is Murphy,” I said into the ball. The vampires’ bat ears pricked up from a thousand yards away (not quite a thousand, that would put him in a different grid square, and he wasn’t) and he looked straight at me. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined he was looking right in my eyes.
If he could hypnotize at extreme rifle range, he was pretty darned good. But I didn’t need much more time.
Simms flopped back into view, half in and half out of his hole, struggling with a vampire twice his size, a real long-headed Slavic monster. Simms had his bayonet rammed to the hilt in the Russki’s chest, but the vampire’s gray curving claws were clutching at him and his wicked cobra-sharp fangs quested for his throat. A spot of red had bled through the bandage where the last vampire had tagged Simms, and it was driving the Russian mad with desire.
He’d survived one vampire bite by the grace of damn near God himself. I wasn’t letting him fall to another one.
“Send it,” I said, and shot the vampire general.
The west horizon flamed. Seconds later, the PUM PUM PUM of the guns blended into a continuous freight-train roar, which grew louder and louder as the first shells dropped towards us.
But also towards them.
The general heard his approaching doom, of course. He hurriedly mounted the back of his zombie dragon steed and kicked it in the ribs; it obediently spread wings that were just struts with the skin burned away, and flapped.
Flapped real hard. It did all it could to obey his commands. But he was on my block now, and on Earth, gravity’s got you by the butt unless you got some lift handy.
Which requires surface area. Not just a bunch of sticks.
So just like the book says, I had my mouth open when the shells hit. Not to equalize pressure and prevent my eardrums from bursting, no. Because I was laughing at the mighty vampire lord, stuck in place by Gnorfank’s bravery and his own damn pride.
* * * * *
They call the blast effect of a shell “concussion.” I can vouch for that: it’s a very descriptive name.
It was actually growing light, in a steadier, less artilleristic way, when I started noticing details again. Like where I was, and why I was here.
Clancy had layered the field with a checkerboard of truck-sized craters, smoking and steaming. Some were burning in their depths, pouring out oceans of thick white smoke; others just steamed, the roasted dirt surrounding them steaming as well.
You’d think nothing could survive such a pasting, but a few always do. I was surprised to be among them, however.
The enemy survivors were moving around, slowly orienting themselves. There didn’t seem to be very many of them left, certainly not when you consider how many they’d thrown at us. But there were still a lot more enemy than there were of me.
I got the jump on them, being alive and all. Most of the ones still moving were kids; they hadn’t been as likely to get hit by fragments from the artillery.
Pretty soon, I was running out of ammo, but the zombies weren’t out of teeth.
I made my shots count; I even used the sights on my .45, holding it at arm’s length. Usually by the time you’re down to a pistol, you’re in a trench or a hallway and it’s push the barrel into his belly and let him have it. But now, I tried to put each one in an eye. Skulls are tough, even when you’ve been dead for a while. Not every head shot counts.
I did okay; I’m no Sgt. York. But one bullet to one zombie was tipping against me.
Three of them tried to step over the same corpse at the same moment; they got tangled up and tripped over each other. While they tried to get up, each overlapping the other two’s legs, I popped out my last Thompson magazine. Twenty shiny brass cartridges, each the right size to feed my .45. If I was going to be shooting slowly, I might as well use something I could aim with one hand.
My other hand was holding my guts in, or so it felt like. I think I’d broken a rib or something, probably from falling down hard after a shellburst. I didn’t think it was shrapnel; I wasn’t feeling the gritty stiffness that comes with blood loss. But concussion could pick you up and throw you into a rock from twenty yards away, and you wouldn’t even know how bad you were hurt until later.
For the first time, I thanked God the enemy didn’t issue its zombies with hand grenades.
Speaking of grenades, there were mines buried here and there all over this part of the Polish-German border. Maybe Vatunska could find us one…no, Vatunska was dead. Right. But surely Dave knew enough of the art of the dirt to dig one up. If he wasn’t too busy.
I was so fuddled that I didn’t realize at first, even after I scrabbled over into Dave’s hole, that he was dead, too.
The tough little guy had caught a bullet high on his scalp. There wasn’t a lot of blood. Which was a bad sign.
About the time I was checking his wrists for bites (the neck, though it contains big shallow arteries, and is traditional, is hard to wrestle with a resisting victim), the three zombies out there won their Indian wrestling match and came toward me in a line, win, place, and show.
I put Win down with an eyebrow shot, but Place took three. Show tripped over Place’s body, and, once I put my remaining three into the top of his head, to no visible effect, my Colt gave the dead man’s click.
I squeezed harder, because that’s what you do when you’re stupid.
Gnorfank could have chopped him down with a BAR or even a bazooka shell; I’d probably have survived. Lodge would have taken him out with a single round, probably from too far away for me to see. And Larzelere would have strangled a zombie with his bare hands, which is impossible, if it was the only way to kill it.
But none of them were here anymore.
By the time I could get one more bullet into my magazine, Show would be on me. I know this for a fact, because that’s what I tried to do, and that’s what happened.
He gasped when he got close, as though presented with a nice surprise. Well, I was bleeding a little. I guess it was like waking up to the smell of bacon in the morning.
He was so excited he came at me fangs first, instead of hands first. Which was fine, as my Colt wasn’t good for much else besides battlefield dentistry.
I smacked him between the jaws in mid-lunge, and the barrel went inside his mouth. I pulled the trigger—hey, miracles happen—and the hammer caught on his cheek.
They teach us judo in the Scouts. I rolled to my left and let his weight drag him down, hanging on like hell to my pistol. His weight ripped it free.
He’d been moaning before; now he was wailing. I pounded on his head to make him stop.
Which is how I got bit, of course. One of my thumps came at the same time he made a lurch forward, and he got a fangful of hand. My hand.
I couldn’t rip my hand back out; it was stuck. Also, it hurt too much, but that hadn’t really snapped into focus yet.
So I dropped on my belly, because my left hand was holding me up. And right now, it was my only weapon.
I was going to slug him in the snout when smoke curled out of his mouth.
He backpedaled out from under me with the strength of panic. His fang dragged in my hand for a moment, then he turned his head sideways and got it loose. I grabbed at him, unwilling to let him get away, because like I said, I was stupid just then.
Smoke and steam rolled out of his mouth like he’d eaten a locomotive. He rolled over on hands and knees, tried to get up, and vomited fire, actual orange and yellow fire, onto the ground in front of him. Smoke was curling out of his left ear.
Then he exploded.
It wasn’t a boom, like a grenade; more of a pop. But that gulp of my blood had turned into pure TNT in his throat, and taken the whole top of his body with it.
Elves don’t have a patron saint. Not officially. But I thanked St. Ronald Reuel anyhow, as coherently as I could manage. Sure, I’d heard the Un-dead can’t drink the blood of the Old Folk, but I never thought what that would actually mean. A curse, “I am undone!”, and a dignified sinking into eternal slumber? Apparently, that was for movie vampires.
And I was a half-Irish mutt. What would have happened if he’d bitten my old man, or some other hundred percent Fey?
There was Dave. I shook him. Maybe there was a chance? But he was still. Wherever his spirit was destined, whether it was in fact destiny or of his own making, he’d gone there.
I was sitting there, hand on his shoulder, when the blow landed on my neck.
* * * * *
I fell from a great height into a river of boiling blood.
That’s just as bad a thing to feel as it is to read about. I flailed, but the searing stuff was so thick and resistant that I couldn’t stay on top. I went under, holding my breath, but the smell and the pain was everywhere.
I hit bottom—rounded, bobbing things, like coconuts—and kicked back to the surface.
I started swimming, trying to lay on my back and float. It hurt a little less that way; my face wasn’t in it. I had to think of the fluid I was swimming in as “it” in order to keep my wits together. They say every man’s got his limit, but most of ‘em are lucky enough to die before they reach it.
Each pair of panicky strokes got me a little closer to the bank. Then hands were grabbing my sleeves, and I wanted to fight them off, but my arms were like lead.
“Come on, Sarge. It ain’t so bad,” a lazy Brooklyn voice told me. “Look at it this way: it ain’t your blood, is it?”
“Dave!” I said.
I’d had hopes for that crazy lug, but it sure was good to see him.
Even in Hell.
“We wuz wondering if you was going to make it,” he told me as he wiped the blood off my arms. “Gnorfank said no way, but I was like, ‘The Sarge is the meanest corksoaker to ever soak a cork, if you get my drift. He always pulls through.’”
“Except when he dies,” put in Pruitt. Him, I wasn’t surprised to see. “Which is always.”
“Up yours, lucky man,” I said. Then I got my eyes in focus. “Why’s everyone naked?” I wanted to know.
“We ain’t got your pixie exception,” Pruitt complained. “Strictly one rag to a customer.”
“Then where’s your rags?”
“Aw, we found a better use for them old things,” Dave said proudly. “We braided ‘em into a rope. Been hauling guys outta the river all night. You know, there’s layers and layers of ‘em down there, underneath of the blood.”
Dave always did want to know how things worked.
“Yeah, so each guy, he comes up with a lorn-cloth of his own,” Dave went on. “An’ we braid it right onto the rope! We’re fishing guys up from the middle already!”
“So where’s all these guys?”
“Up on the slope, keeping the zombies away,” he said. “This part of Hell is, like, full of zombies. An’ you can’t kill ‘em, not even with a headshot, no way, no how. I guess because it’s Hell and all.”
“But they ain’t got nothing but their bare hands either,” Pruitt explained. “So we can hold ‘em off with fisticuffs. A’course, there’s a lotta rocks around, too. Dumbheads don’t seem to realize you can use the scenery as a weapon. So we’re pretty secure.”
“Food an’ water could be an inconvenience, though,” Dave said. “I sent Lodge out to see if there’s anything we can eat, because I don’t want to start chewing on zombie flesh.” He chewed his mustache thoughtfully. “Very unsanitary.”
“What, are you scared a catching a disease? You’re in Hell, pal!” Pruitt said.
“So where else are you most likely to catch a disease?” Dave responded in a reasonable tone. “War, famine, pestilence, an’ the other thing, right? Murph, am I right?”
I waved away his dispute.
“You got Lodge, too?” I said instead.
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “Pretty much everybody who got killed up there made it here. We got Gnorfank, we got Larzelere…boy, is he mad!…uh, Simms, Martini, and some of First Platoon, too. Not Vatunska…that boy’s on his own personal path. Uh huh. Old-school Dwarf.”
“Grace?”
“No Grace. Din’t you say he got killed in the artillery barrage, back before all the zombies?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, that’s what I got everyone doing, so with my report all made, I turn the company back over to you,” he said grandly. “Only it’s like about a platoon of the original company left. But, on the other hand, we got about a hundred river guys.”
“River guys?”
“You know, guys. Outta the river. The river o’ blood, over there. S’where most of us fell in.”
“Who are they? The river guys.”
“I dunno,” he said. “None of ‘em speak English.”
I might have been relieved of my duties by this point; after all, married people promise “til death do us part.” But I’d promised to carry out the duties of my office, and to defend the Constitution of the United States, obey my officers and require such obedience, et cetera. There wasn’t anything in there about “until.”
So if I wasn’t getting out of my duties, I might as well stand up.
I did so, hitching my Thompson strap over my shoulder. When I got time to clean the blood from it, that little gun might be extremely useful, especially if nobody else down here had one.
And since there wasn’t anything else to do, I said what you’re supposed to say when you’re an officer of the Army, nobody has a plan, and everything around you has gone straight to Hell: “Dog Company! Follow me.”
They hit us around the very first bend. Rounding a red rock covered in spines, with streamlets of smoking lead snaking over the burnt-out sand on the other side, we were all strung out in a long, twisting line.
The river guys were behind us. We weren’t about to trust anyone we didn’t know to sing out when they spotted an ambush; first, they might not see the enemy in time. Second, they might not react in time. Third, they couldn’t tell us what they saw, on account of they didn’t speak any language we could understand. And Fourth, but it probably shoulda come first: these guys were in Hell for a reason.
Yes, yes…so were we. I’m not saying we were better than anybody else. We just knew each other better than anybody else.
So up front, we had our best point man, Lodge. He was pretty down about ending up in Hell, but not really all that surprised. “I had some urges,” was the way he put it. And behind him was Higgins, the bank robber, who’d sort of scouted out a lot of the deadlier sins before he got here, if you know what I mean.
With those two looking out for us, we weren’t taken by surprise. But the bushwhackers were big, made partly of jagged crystal spikes, and had raging furnaces within. When they opened their mouths, it hurt your eyes and face just from the brightness of it.
You may recall that when I fell this last time, I hadn’t had a whole lot of ammo left. That condition still applied. But we also had Pruitt, who had an eye for the main chance all out of proportion to his Lucky Man gifts.
Lodge and Higgins fell back, the one loping surefootedly, the other scrambling and falling on his hands. But they fell back around the bend.
And behind them, a dozen of us whirled what Dave called “lorn-cloths” around our heads, weighted by big, round rocks.
We’d practiced before we left the River of Blood. The first demon, or monster, or whatever-it-was around the corner caught three big rocks right in the face, to say nothing of knees, belly, and chest. And Hell’s rocks are hard; he tumbled right over.
So did the next one. Someone in the back hollered, “Psiloi!” like it was a baseball game.
However, nothing works perfectly in this world, or even the next. The third monster to lurch around the rock into view was pretty much solid rock, all the way through. The cracks in his elephantine mineral hide glowed volcanic orange when he moved, much like Chalky, my dancing companion from the raid near Waldorfsbruck, back in ‘44.
Him, I’d blown up with a flare. I didn’t think it would work as well with a guy, or perhaps gal, from a place this bubbling hot, even if I’d still had any flares left.
So I used a rock, on the theory that pretty much all you can use is what you have. The guys fell back further, which was all part of the plan; if we couldn’t beat it, we’d beat it in the other direction, as Dave put it.
The plan even had an answer for, “What happens to the guy up front who keeps the monster busy, while the rest of us run away?” But it wasn’t what you’d call a good answer.
You can’t die in Hell. Far as I know, I can’t either. But that wasn’t a lot of comfort when the monster puffed himself up like a bomb and started to leak steam from every pore.
I darted up the shallow slope of trickling lead, dodging this way and that to keep my boots from splashing into the molten stuff. Might as well buy the guys as much time as possible.
It was well before I ran out of lead-free places to step that a big old rock, about as wide as a football, spiraled overhead and caught the Big Rock Monster square in the side of the mouth, knocking it open. Flames exploded out of his mouth, screaming to be free, and his rocky body collapsed on itself, crumbling like an empty paper bag made of hellrocks.
Coming forward from among the river guys was, well, a river guy. Splashed with the horror waters of the Pit, but holding his head high. He had another rock in his offhand just in case.
I knew that perfect chin. But I couldn’t associate it with this background.
“Grace,” I said, unbelieving. “What are you doing here?”
He smiled, but seemed unsure how to begin. Then, “Well…pride is a sin,” he said. “So I’m trying not to be surprised, myself. But you know, it sort of fits with something I’d been thinking about, before I went away.
“Mick,” he added, “I think I might be the angel of America.
“Think about it for a minute,” he continued, when I didn’t bust out laughing. “If there were an angel watching over America, would he start out full-fledged, with an eagle’s wings, forty-eight golden halos, wreathed in the Stars and Stripes, ten feet tall and full of wisdom? A mixture of Uncle Sam and Moses on the mountain?”
“I don’t think he would. I think to be the guardian of America, he’d have to start out as we did, outcast from another world and thrown on a foreign shore. Idealistic, but not obedient. Was there ever such a thing in the world before? Making his own way in the world, but also content to let everyone else go his own way, with no man to call master, none to call slave. Trying one thing after another, finding what worked and discarding what didn’t, and always, always arguing with himself over the rightness of his cause. Because you can’t stay on the right track if you don’t constantly check to see which way you’re going.”
“I think maybe I was made for this mission, Mick. For the Harrowing of Hell, by Man this time. And Man’s friends,” he said, taking in me and Dave with a handwave.
“To come to a place where there are plenty of rules, but they’re all wicked. Where no man is free, and all men are tempted to evil by unspeakable suffering. Where the only thing making a man decent, honest, and clean is his own will, and the fellowship of others.”
“Just like America was. In the beginning.”
So here I am in upper Hell, with some very angry but deeply confused demons torturing each other to find out which way we’ve gone. The mountains are tricky; even things that have lived here forever, literally, can lose their way. We ambushed quite a few of them using just that fact.
Sure, we get lost, too. But we’re used to that. Back at Fort Harrison, the General gave us maps he made himself in a little print shop in Helena. They weren’t all wrong, either, just wrong enough to get you hopelessly snarled before the enemy hit you.
It teaches you to make your own map as you go.
We even hooked up with Kovach, eventually broke him out of torment. He’s our linguist now. He hasn’t been Down Below very long, comparatively speaking, having died just about a year ago Topside, but he’s learned how to talk to just about everyone we run into. It helps that you don’t sleep down here; there’s more time to get things done.
We’re in occasional touch with Brenner, also, who’s making things unpleasant beyond the Blood River, down where the big boys play. And once in a great while, we get a message through to Up There, letting them know where we are, and what this place looks like today.
It wasn’t the plan. Not at all. But it looks like we’re starting the war from right here.
And it ain’t like we’re outnumbered, either. Almost everyone down here is unhappy, to say the least, with the way this place is run. It’s a very unstable government, popular-opinion-wise. They’re looking to switch sides. Fear holds them in line, of course, but we win just one little skirmish and suddenly they know it’s not all bad. The Devil can be beaten. Even in Hell.
We can recruit from the best soldiers Hell has to offer. And it’s not a comforting thought, but still a cold hard military fact: Hell has just about all of the best. The 33rd Division was a good outfit, and the Spiritual Scouting Force was an amazing one, but this crowd, whatever you end up calling ‘em—they’re really something else.
Nothing’s perfect—I sure wish we could find Alvin York down here, and maybe Robin Hood and George Washington. Jackson and Stuart, Grant and Lee. Old Black Jack Pershing. But that’s selfish; it’s better for them that they ain’t here.
I’m still not sure Sergeant Caesar ain’t gonna turn on me when the right time comes. And Corporal Alcibiades has entirely too many friends among the men to trust him, either. Lieutenant Napoleon keeps the big guns moving right where we want them, although he doesn’t hide his ambitions. Not to mention that nut Achilles; no one even tries to give him orders, but we do keep giving him ammo and rations, not to mention an extra-thick left boot.
Not the most reliable allies. But what are they gonna do? Betray me in favor of the Devil?
He came out from his stinking hole to use his powers against us mortal men. Shucked his guise. Well, now it’s our turn to repay the favor. Once a man’s seen what the Enemy really is, well, there’s not much I can do that doesn’t leave me looking like a far, far better alternative.
You want to look like a clean-cut leader of men? Stand next to the Devil. As a tactic to win friends and influence people, I can personally recommend it.
I gotta go. Forrest’s found a hole in their lines. He and Sheridan ended up working pretty smoothly together after all. Who’d have thought it? And with their cavalry being mostly Mongols, at that. Seems like that whole entire nation ended up down here.
It’s funny that the Devil did a better job of bringing us all together than God ever did. But then, I guess that’s the joke. And the joke’s on him.
Time to deliver the punch line. I want to be there when we do…
Respectfully submitted,
Master Sgt. Mithrandil Murphy, U.S. Army
Commanding Officer, the Biggest Damn Company You Ever Saw
Upper Hell August 6, 1945
# # # # #
Steve Johnson teaches school in central Virginia. He has at times been a crime reporter, pineapple butcher, comic book journalist, Homeland Security researcher, and e-healthcare correspondent. A lifelong book-a-day man and early adopter of Heinlein and E.E. “Doc” Smith, he’s been writing space opera for decades and war fiction for several years. He is married to librarian and author Virginia C. Johnson.
Catch up with Steven and join his mailing list at https://hellbustershq.com.
* * * * *
Get the free Four Horseman prelude story “Shattered Crucible”
and discover other Blood Moon Press titles at:
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* * * * *
The following is an
Excerpt from Book One of The Shadow Lands:
Shadow Lands
___________________
Lloyd Behm, II
Now Available from Blood Moon Press
eBook and Paperback
The combatants, for lack of a better term, were both resting at the edges of the dance floor. To the left was a very butch-looking blonde in what looked to be purple leather, along with her entourage, while to the right, a petite, dark-skinned Hispanic in a princess outfit stood, surrounded by meat popsicles wrapped in leather. Vampire fashions make no damn sense to me, for what it’s worth. There were a few ‘normals’ huddled against the far wall, which showed signs of someone’s face being run along it, repeatedly. Sure enough, the London ‘Special’ was in the DJ booth. He killed the sound as soon as he realized we were standing there.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce the final players in our little drama, the Reinhumation Specialists of the Quinton Morris Group!” the Special said into the mike.
“Fuck me running,” I said.
“With a rusty chainsaw,” Jed finished.
The two groups of vampires turned to face us.
“Remind me to kick Michael in his balls when we get back to the office,” I said.
“You’re going to have to get in line behind me to do it,” Jed replied.
“You can leave now, mortals,” the blonde said with a slight German accent. She had occult patterns tattooed around her eyes, which had to be a bitch, because she would have had to have them redone every six months or so. Vampires heal.
“Like, fershure, this totally doesn’t involve you,” the Hispanic said, her accent pure San Fernando Valley.
“Jed, did I ever tell you how I feel about Valley Girls?” I asked, raising my voice.
“No…”
“Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em,” I replied, swinging my UMP up and cratering the Valley vampire’s chest with three rounds into the fragile set of blood vessels above the heart. Sure, the pump still works, but there’s nothing connected to it for what passes as blood in a vampire to spread. On top of that, company-issue bullets are frangible silver, to which vampires have an adverse reaction.
With that, the dance was on. The damn Special in the DJ booth at least had the good sense to put on Rammstein. Mien Teil came thundering out of the speakers as we started killing vampires. Gunny ran his M1897 Trench Gun dry in five shots, dropped it to hang by a patrol sling, and switched to his ancient, family 1911. I ran my UMP dry on Valley Vamp’s minions, then dropped the magazine and reloaded in time to dump the second full magazine into the Butch Vampire as she leaped toward the ceiling to clear the tables between us and the dance floor. As soon as Butch Vamp went down, the remaining vampires froze.
“Glamour,” the Special called, stepping out of the booth. “I can control a lot of lesser vampires, but not until you got those two randy cunts thinking about how much they hurt.”
“You. Fucking. Asshole,” I panted.
Combat is cardio, I don’t care what anyone else says.
“Yes?” he replied.
I looked him over. He was wearing a red zoot suit—red-pegged trousers and a long red jacket with wide shoulders over the ubiquitous white peasant shirt, topped with a red, wide-brimmed hat. He even had on red-tinted glacier glasses.
I felt his mind try to probe mine, then beamed as he bounced off.
“My that hurt,” he replied.
“You know, we don’t work with Michelangelo for nothing,” Jed replied. Apparently the mind probe had been general, not specific.
I went through the messy side of the business—staking and beheading—assisted by Capdepon. Crash helped Jed sort out the normal survivors, followed by prepping the live lesser vampires for transport. The Special leaned against a wall, maintaining control of the lesser vampires until we could move them out. Once all the work was done so the cleaners could move in, and the lesser vampires were moved out of Eyelash, I stepped wearily to the Special.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“You can call me,” he paused dramatically, “Tim.”
I kicked him in the nuts with a steel-toed boot. Even in the undead, it’s a sensitive spot.
* * * * *
Get “Shadow Lands” now at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KX8GHYX/.
Find out more about Lloyd Behm, II and “Shadow Lands” at:
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/imprints-authors/lloyd-behm-ii/.
* * * * *
The following is an
Excerpt from Book Two of The Fallen World:
Don’t Call Me Ishmael
___________________
Chris Kennedy
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I froze. After a moment, I turned my head—slowly—to look in the direction of the voice. An older man looked over the sights of a rifle he was resting on top of a large gas grill. He was probably in his early sixties, with hair and beard unkempt and gone to gray. And then I saw his eyes. Even though the man looked physically old and tired, the eyes said he wasn’t a man to be trifled with—he knew what he was doing and would pull the trigger if given a reason. I didn’t move any further.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man asked.
“Running, mostly,” I replied. I was too tired to try to come up with any sort of cover story, and I was pretty sure he’d already figured that much out on his own.
“I saw that,” the man replied, confirming my guess. “What…no, I guess the right question is, who are you running from?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I woke up in a building that looked like a war had been fought in it. A couple of guys attacked me, and I killed them with a pistol I found in the room I woke up in. I don’t know who they are—who they were—all I know is they were both big guys and had a strip of blue cloth around their arms.”
“Well then, son, you are well and truly in a world of shit.”
I cocked my head and looked pointedly at the rifle the man was holding. “I’m pretty sure I already knew that.”
The man chuckled. “I’m the least of your problems. If you killed a couple of the Blues, they will be coming for you.”
“I kinda figured that,” I replied. “They chased me across the highway, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be here soon. I’d be happy to be on my way, if you’d just point the gun some other direction.”
“I haven’t rightly figured what I want to do with you yet. If you’ve pissed off the Blues, I’d probably get a decent reward for turning you in to them.” He looked at me oddly for a second, then said, “You look familiar. What’s your name?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. Something came to me. “Call me Ishmael.”
“Is that your name?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember my name; in fact, I really can’t remember anything beyond when I woke up four days ago. I’ve got amnesia.”
“Amnesia, huh? Well, that’s a stupid name to call yourself. Why don’t you call yourself ‘Fred’ or something? Can you at least remember your last name?”
“No, although I’d be happy to tell it to you if I could. Especially with your gun pointed at me. I don’t suppose…”
“You suppose right. I’m going to keep this rifle pointed at you until I get some answers and decide you’re okay, or I decide you’re not okay, and I kill you.”
“Well, ask me your questions quickly then. Even though I don’t want to die, I’m in kind of a hurry.”
The man’s brows knit. “What did you do before the war?”
“What war?”
“What war? The big war we just had! The Corporations throwing nukes around like they were treats for your kids. You don’t remember that?”
“No, I don’t. If it happened more than four days ago, I don’t remember it.”
“Most of the country’s been wiped out. My guess is that Obsidian ‘won,’ if there is such a thing in nuclear war. Teledyne seemed to get its ass pretty well handed to it, although there isn’t much left of Obsidian, either. Nor much of the country, for that matter. I wouldn’t go any further south. New Orleans took some hits during the bomb throwing, and most of it’s radioactive.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Same as everyone,” the man said. “We’re hunkering down, waiting for the reestablishment of law by the police. The first few days were pretty bad as everyone tried to hoard all the food, water, and ammo they could get their hands on—lost my wife at the grocery store to a firefight—but now everyone’s just trying to defend what’s theirs and hold on as best they can.” He nodded toward the house, and I looked over to see two more rifles pointed at me. That was probably a good thing, as I’d been trying to decide if I wanted to try to take the man. My reflexes were improving, but probably not good enough to beat all three. If I didn’t have any other option, I’d still try it, but continued negotiation seemed the better bet. I’d also seen two young kids behind the people with rifles, and I didn’t particularly want to kill their grandpa in from of them, no matter whether I was a psycho killer or not.
“So what’s it going to be?” I asked. “You going to kill me, hand me over to the Blues, or let me go?”
The man turned his head and spat. “I ain’t got no problem killing people who’re trying to take away what’s mine, though I ain’t big on killing someone in cold blood.” He waved the barrel of his gun toward the front of his property. “Get the hell out of here. Maybe you can still get away from the Blues.”
I didn’t have to be told that twice. “Thank you,” I said, nodding to him as I went past. I went down to the street, turned left, and turned left again at the corner to continue north. I’d made it about a block when the gunfire started up behind me.
Sometimes, there’s no escape in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
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The following is an
Excerpt from Book One of The Devil’s Gunman:
The Devil’s Gunman
___________________
Philip S. Bolger
Now Available from Blood Moon Press
eBook and Paperback
I eased the door open and braced for gunfire or a fireball.
I got neither. I swept the entryway with my rifle’s sights. Nothing more offensive than some high school photos glared back at me, and I didn’t hear anything running down the hallway or readying a weapon. There were no shouts from police or federal agents, either.
What I did hear, from the living room, was incessant chatter underscored by the occasional interjection of a laugh track. The chatter was accompanied by the soft peripheral glow of my television. Whoever had broken into my house was watching a sitcom.
“I’m unarmed,” a man’s voice rang out. “So put down the rifle, and let’s have a talk.”
“The fuck we will,” I shouted back. “You broke into my home!”
I moved down the hallway, keeping my rifle on the opening to the living room.
“That’s part of what we have to talk about,” the voice said. I peered around the corner and saw a young Caucasian man. His pale features and dyed blue hair did little to mask the malicious smirk on his face. He was dressed in an oxford shirt and slacks with a skinny tie, as though he couldn’t figure out if he wanted to look like he’d just joined a band or an investment firm. He wore a silver tie clip with a red blood drop on it.
I stood there with my rifle sights on his head.
“I’m here as a messenger,” he said and flashed his teeth. I saw pointed incisors. That was enough for me. “This is peaceful, Nicholas. No need to be violent.”
I lowered the rifle. I didn’t like the prick’s condescending tone; he sounded like he enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Those types were always eager to give up information.
“Okay, let’s talk. Who’s the message from?” I asked.
“I hold the honored post of Emissary of the Lyndale Coven,” he said politely, examining his nails. “We’ve taken a professional interest in you, and Coven leadership sent me.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What for?”
“To dictate the terms of your surrender,” he said, locking eyes with me. His hands twitched, then curled slightly. I imagined him leaping off the couch and knocking me down. I fought the urge to bring the rifle to bear, keeping it at the low ready.
“Thought your kind needed an invite,” I said.
The man snarled.
“We both know who built this house. I have a standing invite. The coven master says that the Duke no longer wants you, so you’re fair game. Our agreement, which I have right here, has the details.”
He pulled a no-shit scroll out of his suit jacket and put it down on my coffee table. I glanced at it. The Lyndale Coven seemed to be under the impression that I belonged to them. I read the word “slave” once, and that was enough for me to decide I wasn’t interested.
“No dice,” I said.
“These terms are much more charitable than those the Coven Master wanted,” he said, warning in his voice. “Oath breakers aren’t normally given this kind of clemency.”
I didn’t have much idea what he meant about oath breakers, but I wasn’t going to play ball with this pompous fuck.
“Not charitable enough,” I said. “Why do you guys want me? Running out of blood from young clubgoers and runaways?”
The young vampire smiled again, flashing his teeth with what I’m sure he thought was menace.
“It’ll certainly improve our coven’s standings with the Duke if we prove we can clean up his loose ends. I’m sure you’ll make an excellent blood thrall. We’ll be taking a pint of blood every month, as—”
I raised the rifle and sighted in on his head. He sighed, and rolled his eyes.
“Look, you primitive ape, guns won’t—”
I fired three times, the rounds earth-shatteringly loud in such a tight place. He screamed in pain and terror as the holy rifle’s bullets tore through him, the wounds leaving bright blue caverns of light.
His screaming echoed in my head, so I kept shooting. I fired the rest of the magazine until there was nothing left but a corpse, riddled with holes and glowing softly, and me, standing there in my gunpowder-fueled catharsis.
I dropped the mag and slapped in a fresh one, savoring the sound of the bolt sliding forward and knowing that if the emissary had any friends, they too, would be introduced to the kinetic light of St. Joseph.
“Anyone else here? I got more.”
* * * * *
Get “The Devil’s Gunman” now at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N1QF4MD.
Find out more about Philip S. Bolger and “The Devil’s Gunman” at:
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/philip-s-bolger/.
* * * * *
The following is an
Excerpt from Book One of The Darkness War:
Psi-Mechs, Inc.
___________________
Eric S. Brown
Available Now from Blood Moon Press
eBook and Paperback
Ringer reached the bottom of the stairs and came straight at him. “Mr. Dubin?” Ringer asked.
Frank rose to his feet, offering his hand. “Ah, Detective Ringer, I must say it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Ringer didn’t accept his proffered hand. Instead, he stared at Frank with appraising eyes.
“I’m told you’re with the Feds. If this is about the Hangman killer case…” Ringer said.
Frank quickly shook his head. “No, nothing like that, Detective. I merely need a few moments of your time.”
“You picked a bad night for it, Mr. Dubin,” Ringer told him. “It’s a full moon out there this evening, and the crazies are coming out of the woodwork.”
“Crazies?” Frank asked.
“I just locked up a guy who thinks he’s a werewolf.” Ringer sighed. “We get a couple of them every year.”
“And is he?” Frank asked with a grin.
Ringer gave Frank a careful look as he said, “What do you mean is he? Of course not. There’s no such thing as werewolves, Mr. Dubin.”
“Anything’s possible, Detective Ringer.” Frank smirked.
“Look, I really don’t have time for this.” Ringer shook his head. “Either get on with what you’ve come to see me about, or go back to wherever you came from. I’ve got enough on my hands tonight without you.”
“Is there somewhere a touch more private we could talk?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Ringer answered reluctantly. “This way.”
Ringer led Frank into a nearby office and shut the door behind them. He walked around the room’s desk and plopped into the chair there.
“Have a seat,” Ringer instructed him, gesturing at the chair in front of the desk.
Frank took it. He stared across the desk at Ringer.
“Well?” Ringer urged.
“Detective Ringer, I work for an organization that has reason to believe you have the capacity to be much more than the mere street detective you are now,” Frank started.
“Hold on a sec.” Ringer leaned forward where he sat. “You’re here to offer me a job?”
“Something like that.” Frank grinned.
“I’m not interested,” Ringer said gruffly and started to get up. Frank’s next words knocked him off his feet, causing him to collapse back into his chair as if he’d been gut-punched.
“We know about your power, Detective Ringer.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ringer said, though it was clear he was lying.
“There’s no reason to be ashamed of your abilities, Detective,” Frank assured him, “and what the two of us are about to discuss will never leave this room.”
“I think it’s time you left now, Mr. Dubin,” Ringer growled.
“Far from it,” Frank said. “We’re just getting started, Detective Ringer.”
Ringer sprung from his seat and started for the office’s door. “You can either show yourself out, or I can have one of the officers out there help you back to the street.”
Frank left his own seat and moved to block Ringer’s path. “I have a gift myself, Detective Ringer.”
Shaking his head, Ringer started to shove Frank aside. Frank took him by the arm.
“My gift is that I can sense the powers of people like yourself, Detective,” Frank told him. “You can’t deny your power to me. I can see it in my mind, glowing like a bright, shining star in an otherwise dark void.”
“You’re crazy,” Ringer snapped, shaking free of Frank’s hold.
“You need to listen to me,” Frank warned. “I know about what happened to your parents. I mean what really happened, and how you survived.”
Frank’s declaration stopped Ringer in his tracks.
“You don’t know crap!” Ringer shouted as Frank continued to stare at him.
“Vampires are very real, Detective Ringer.” Frank cocked his head to look up at Ringer as he spoke. “The organization I work for…We deal with them, and other monsters, every day.”
Ringer stabbed a finger into Frank’s chest. It hurt, as Ringer thumped it repeatedly against him. “I don’t know who you are, Mr. Dubin, but I’ve had enough of your crap. Now take your crazy and get the hell out of my life. Do I make myself clear?”
The pictures on the wall of the office vibrated as Ringer raged at Frank. Frank’s smile grew wider.
“You’re a TK, aren’t you?” Frank asked.
“I don’t even know what that is!” Ringer bellowed at him.
“You can move objects with your mind, Detective Ringer. We call that TK. It’s a term that denotes you have telekinetic abilities. They’re how you saved yourself from the vampire who murdered your family when you were thirteen.”
Ringer said nothing. He stood, shaking with fear and rage.
“You’re not alone, Detective Ringer,” Frank told him. “There are many others in this world with powers like your own. As I’ve said, I have one myself, though it’s not as powerful or as physical in nature, as your own. I urge you to have a seat, so we can talk about this a little more. I highly doubt your captain would be as understanding of your gift as I and my employer are if it should, say, become public knowledge.”
“Is that a threat?” Ringer snarled.
Frank shook his head. “Certainly not. Now if you would…?” Frank gestured for Ringer to return to the chair behind the desk.
Ringer did so, though he clearly wasn’t happy about it.
“There’s so much to tell you, Detective Ringer; I’m afraid I don’t even know where to begin,” Frank said.
“Then why don’t you start at the beginning, and let’s get this over with,” Ringer said with a frown.
“Right then.” Frank chuckled. “Let’s do just that.”
* * * * *
Get “Psi-Mechs, Inc.” now at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DKCCQJZ/
Find out more about Eric S. Brown and “The Darkness War” at:
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/imprints-authors/eric-s-brown/.
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