“He was smiling. His mouth was stretched wide and he had the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen, I half expected the sonuvabitch to start laughing then and there. But he didn’t. His mouth was smiling, but it never reached his eyes. His eyes, they were dark brown as I recall, but they looked black as a coal mine at midnight right then.
“I looked back just as the glass chamber they’d put that man in was filled with a green gas. It wasn’t just green. It had specks of light in it, like fireflies seen in a heavy fog. Whatever it was they’d put in that little glass cage, it was enough to stop the tortured screaming I’d been hearing. The man’s body was barely revealed through the dark gas that floated in the area with him. I think part of me was happy for his silence, or maybe just relieved. Either way, it didn’t take long for me to get over that. I stopped feeling much of anything but a lump of fear in my throat when I saw his body start twitching.
“When the gas cleared — and by cleared I guess I mean when it had been absorbed into his flesh — I saw the bloodied, torn body lying flat on the ground in that little glass cage. And I saw the way he didn’t breathe anymore, and the way the eyes had rolled into the back of his head. I felt my blood ready to boil over at the very notion of that sort of torture just to kill a man. To actually peel back flesh and muscle, to bury screws in skin and leave a man in that state, only to gas him to death… I couldn’t believe it, and I whispered as much to Crowley as I started checking my rifle. I was gonna end this madness, and I was gonna kill me a few dozen Nazis in the process.
“Crowley looked over at me and for the first time since we’d entered the château, I could see the humor in his eyes as well as on his face. He leaned in really close to me, close enough that for a second I was afraid he was going to kiss me, and he whispered back. ‘I’m betting that thing down there might not be so easy to kill with a bullet, old son. I’m betting that maybe he would take a bullet from you as an insult and maybe decide to kill you for your trouble.’
“I had no idea what he was talking about, but he pointed toward the glass chamber and I looked in that direction. And all that rage I’d built up, all that anger I’d focused to help me with the idea of killing so many people… died away. I went from angry to terrified in about as long as it takes me to blink my eyes.
“The man they’d killed was standing, and he looked even less human than before. The skin on his body had turned green, a little lighter in color than the gas he’d been forced to breathe, but not by much. And his eyes, which I had seen roll back into his head until all I could see was the whites, looked around with pupils that glowed with that same firefly light I’d seen earlier. He looked around, and his mouth I’d seen screaming earlier closed with a snap like a bear trap slamming down on a deer’s hind leg.
“I stood there looking down at the thing in the chamber. It barely resembled the man they’d dragged in there minutes earlier. One of the men, the one wearing a Gestapo uniform under his lab coat, barked out orders at the thing in German. It stepped forward, leaving its cage and moving with all the precision of an honor guard presenting itself to the President of these United States. That poor, tortured soul knew how to follow orders, and it was ready to follow its new master for as long as it saw fit.
“Crowley tapped my shoulder, and when I looked at him, he winked. ‘You want the green guy, or do you want the soldiers? Your choice.’ I answered him by leveling my rifle and putting a bullet through the head of the Nazi who was barking orders.”
I barely heard my grandfather speak his next words. They were so faint I had to strain to make them out. He spoke them in a hurried whisper, a dirty confession that he had to make, but didn’t want to speak. “That was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed killing a man, Eddie. But before the night was done, I’d enjoyed the feeling over a dozen times.
“Jonathan Crowley, slick-sleeved soldier in the US Army, looked at me and set his rifle down next to me. He grinned like a kid at Christmas, and said to me, ‘You’re a good man, Ben Finch. Don’t let them take that away from you.’ Then, before I could even say a word, he was running. He moved like lightning down the hallway, and I thought for sure he was abandoning me to get my ass killed by a bunch of pissed off Nazis. I didn’t see as I had much choice, so I picked off the next one.
“By the time the second one hit the ground, trying to scream through the hole I’d made in his throat, the rest of them were calling out in German and one or two of them were pointing at me. The ones that had guns started shooting. I ducked for cover, and watched as two of them made for the stairwell, ready, I’m sure, to meet me head on and put a few hundred rounds into my sorry ass. I’d ask if you ever had bullets coming at you, Eddie, but I already know the answer. It was all I could do to look up from time to time from my prone position. I just knew I was a goner as soon as those soldiers made it to the top of the stairwell. I’d be a sitting duck, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
“I was thinking about that and how full my bladder felt, when I saw the two guards who’d come up the stairs go right back down again. I could tell by the way they fell that they were dead. You can’t move like that and be alive. Next thing I saw was Jonathan Crowley walking down those steps and looking around the room. Everyone was so busy looking for me that they never even saw him come into their little torture chamber.
“It didn’t take him long to rectify that situation. He strutted right on up to the first of them and lashed out with a foot that moved so fast I barely saw it. The Kraut dropped just as sure as if I’d shot him, his mouth bleeding and teeth flying. I shot the next one over, and then I saw most of them turn toward Crowley. He should have been terrified, I know I was scared for him, but he was smiling again, looking happier than any man has a right to look during a war.
“One of them shot him from fifteen feet away, and missed. I was watching, you understand? I was watching that man shoot, and I was calling out a warning, and Crowley managed not to be there when the bullet left the muzzle of that pistol. I don’t think he actually dodged the bullet, I don’t think that’s possible, but I know he wasn’t where he had been by the time the bullet met that spot. Instead, he was right next to the man with the gun. And the man with the gun was screaming because his shot had missed and more than that, it had hit one of his comrades.
“Crowley slipped his arm around the man’s neck like he was gonna say something confidential to him, then he twisted his body and the man fell dead. Even from where I was, even over the shouting and the gunfire, I heard that man’s neck snap like a twig. Before the soldier hit the ground, Crowley used him like a springboard and leapt high into the air. He landed on another Nazi a few feet away and I reckon he killed him as soon as he hit, but just about then I looked in another direction. I looked at the green man them Germans had made. I looked that way because someone else was shouting a command in German, and that fella turned at the sound of the voice and then turned to face Crowley.”
My grandfather looked away then, rubbing his grizzled chin with one hand and staring into the darkened field where the cows grazed. He kept talking, and I kept my mouth shut. “I know I sound crazy but I swear that thing had grown bigger while I was watching Crowley. Not just the flesh on its body, but the metal as well. It looked to be almost seven feet in height. It moved right at Crowley like it was a freight train and he was a piece of rail it meant to run over. Every last one of them Krauts jumped out of its way, too. Like they knew it would be a bad idea to be between that monster and its target.