“Cally, you and Hughes on point. Wilkes and Patel next up, Wiggins is with me, Sarge and Parker, watch our back. Double time, let’s get the flock out of here. Silent running until we’re topside.”
Cally pushed the hangar door open and checked the corridor before turning and giving a thumb and forefinger okay. The squad moved out. As soon as the double door closed at their back, the temperature dropped, although the golden glow stayed with them for the first ten yards of the tunnel. It was only when they left the limits of its light and had to revert to their night-vision goggles that Banks felt some of the tension flow out of him, tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding onto since waking on the floor of the hangar. Each step took him farther from the dance in the dark, and he felt some of his sense of purpose return at the same time as the beat of the rhythm slowly faded from his muscle memory.
He wasn’t given time to enjoy it. Before they even got halfway down the corridor, the double door at the far end opened. A blast of colder air hit them, then tall shadowed figures stepped into the doorway and walked forward, calmly and steadily.
“What the fuck is this now?” Wiggins whispered at Banks’ side.
Banks didn’t want to speculate — didn’t dare to, for he was afraid that he knew the answer. He saw their eyes first, milky white, almost silver in the night vision. There were at least a dozen of them, led by a tall man in the unmistakable dark uniform and peaked hat. Even in the dim light, the black-on-white swastika was clearly visible on his arm.
It was the oberst. The commander of the base was leading his team. Banks had finally found the corpses he’d been searching for. Or rather, they had found him.
The cold dead filled the tunnel ahead.
“What the fuck is this now?” Wiggins repeated loudly.
“It’s fucking trouble, that’s what it is,” Hynd replied.
“Ears in, lads,” Banks said, and slid the plastic plugs in before checking his magazine. He had a full load in the mag and spare clips in his vest, but even as the dead walked, still calm and measured, up the corridor toward them, he knew he wasn’t ready to fire on unarmed men, not when he still wasn’t sure of the situation.
“They were fucking dead, Sarge,” Wiggins said. “You saw them. We all saw them. Fucking devious Nazi wankers.”
Wiggins looked ready to start shooting, and Banks stopped him simply by putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Not now, eh, lad? Not yet anyway. Keep a lid on it.”
Wiggins had the sense to go quiet, but his eyes betrayed what Banks guessed they were all feeling.
This just isn’t possible.
But he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, make himself believe in dead men walking — it went against everything he’d seen in his years of service. Once you’re down, there’s no coming back; he’d seen it often enough to know the truth of it. So he wasn’t about to order a shooting gallery.
But when he turned to look back toward the hangar bay and saw the golden glow showing through the windows, he knew he also wasn’t ready to retreat, not to a place where he’d so recently been so vulnerable.
“Stand ready,” he said quietly. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. But we do know they are, as Wiggins here put it, fucking devious Nazi wankers, so don’t let them get too close. And watch my back.”
Banks stepped forward before he could have second thoughts. He had his rifle in hand, pointed straight at the approaching German officer, ready to shoot at the slightest provocation. The man — the impossibly dead man — kept coming, as did the men behind him, a mixture roughly half split of military and civilians, all with the same milk-white eyes glowing silver in the night vision. Banks’ finger closed on the trigger, ready to shoot, but the tall officer slowed five yards away from him and came to a stop. The other Germans stopped behind him, and the tunnel fell quiet.
Banks felt the cold coming off the bodies of the dead, as if they weren’t composed of flesh at all, but somehow manufactured, perfect mannequins carved from ice. The pale eyes of the oberstleutnant started straight at Banks, unblinking. His lips were gray-blue where they should be red, his skin smooth, almost translucent, like alabaster. Veins, as blue as his lips, showed proud just beneath the surface. Banks was too far away to see any pulse, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if there wasn’t one.
“What happened here?” Banks asked, aware as he spoke that he was attempting a conversation with a man he’d seen most definitely dead not too many hours before. The German did not reply, but his head cocked slightly to one side, as if listening.
“What happened to you?” Banks continued. “We’re here to help.”
The officer raised his left hand and pointed, over Bank’s shoulder, toward the hangar. The gaze of the white eyes stayed fixed on Banks the whole time, but the intent was clear enough.
“You want to go through there? No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Banks said.
The officer kept staring and pointing. The ranks of dead men behind him inched forward, each of them, in parade ground step, taking a short pace up the tunnel.
“Stop right there. That’s far enough,” Banks said, and showed the German the rifle. If it gave the frozen oberstleutnant any pause, it didn’t show. The officer’s pale blue lips moved, as if uttering a command, and he pointed again with his left arm. Although no sound came, the order had been given.
This time when the dead men took a step, it was a full one.
“Cap?” Hynd said behind Banks.
Banks heard the tension in the sergeant’s voice. He took two steps back. The German officer took two steps forward, followed immediately by the dead behind him, who again moved as one in military precision. They stopped, and the oberstleutnant stared at Banks, and pointed up the tunnel toward the hangar with his left hand.
“Cap?” Hynd said again in a whisper. “Maybe we should just let them pass. Let them go wherever the fuck it is they want to go.”
“Give them access to that saucer? No fucking way. They might look like dead men, but these are fucking Nazis, man. I’m not letting them near anything that might be a weapon.”
“So what then?” the sergeant asked.
The matter was taken out of Banks’ hands when the oberstleutnant pointed again, and began to walk forward, faster now, the dead stepping in time behind him.
“Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” Wiggins shouted, and for once, Banks agreed with him.
“Fire,” he shouted.
The tunnel filled with the crack and roar of rifle fire. If the Germans had been flesh, the assault would have reduced them to bloody scraps of red meat, but Banks was dismayed to see that none of them fell under the shots. The squad was hitting their targets. Bits of ice flew where the shots clipped shoulder or skull, but in the main, the bullets seemed to have no effect at all. Banks took careful aim and hit the oberstleutnant in the chest, saw a small hole in the uniform at the impact site, but the tall pale-eyed figure didn’t so much as flinch, just kept coming forward at the same steady pace.
They kept firing.
Cally had to step back to reload. Hughes stepped up in his place, just ahead of Banks, and was the closest of the squad members as the approaching German officer took three more steps forward. Banks saw that the private had moved too far ahead of the rest of the squad and was isolated a few paces in front of the others.
“Hughes, fall back, lad,” Banks shouted, but it was too late. The German officer was almost within arms’ length of the private, who fired three rounds, point blank, into the dead man’s face. One hit the milky white left eye and blew it into icy shards, but the oberst kept coming, ignoring the weapon and reaching out for the man. Pale hands caught Hughes by the neck, and the man’s eyes rolled up as he fell to one side. Banks stepped in and slammed the butt of his weapon against the dead man’s head, chipping off more spattering flakes of ice and frozen flesh. The oberst’s grip tightened on Hughes’ throat, and Banks heard the sound of the private’s neck breaking even above the roar of the gunfire.