Crowley turned to one of the locals and started firing off questions in French. Not a one of us knew he spoke the language, because, of course, he never volunteered that knowledge.
We all listened in, though I suspect most of them were as ignorant as me as to what was said.
Crowley’s face was an open book. He was angry. He was disgusted.
When he’d finished his interrogation he looked directly at the captain and shook his head. “Nazis. They came here yesterday morning and took over the inn. When the sun rose this morning they started working on the people here. The Innkeeper, his wife, his son and a girl who nobody here seems to know.” He gestured to the smallest of the corpses. I guess she was maybe eight or nine years of age. His voice was harsh, his expression was worse.
“Why would they do anything like this?” The captain was as shocked as the rest of us. He stared at the bodies as he spoke and his eyes seemed incapable of drinking in the details. He looked, but I don’t think he saw much of anything. I was in the same boat. It was easier to look at Crowley than to deal with what we were seeing.
Crowley didn’t much seem bothered. He squatted close to the bodies and started looking them over carefully. It only took me a few seconds to realize he was reading what was written on their bodies.
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘shut the hell up so I can read this.’”
I listened. I outranked the man, being as I’d made it all the way to corporal, but that didn’t matter.
He studied the writings on the first body, even going so far as to lift the legs and arms to see if there was more written that might be hidden in the bloodied mud, when the young girl’s corpse sat straight up and looked right at him.
The voice that came from her bloodied mouth never belonged to a child. It was low and deep and loud and spoke words I had never before heard. The sound of them chilled me almost a much as the source.
I backed away, and I know most of the others did too. Several of the villagers got the right idea in my mind and ran for their homes. They had that advantage. My home was over an ocean away.
Crowley spoke back, nearly spitting his answer.
She yelled louder, until he could barely be heard. Her chest did not move. She took in no breaths. Her words came out of a mouth that offered no steam in the cold of the night, when every other person who’d spoke showed their heat with every uttered word.
She came closer to Crowley and he stayed his ground, not looking worried about the approaching shape at all. He stood. I remember that. I also remember wondering why he wasn't screaming and running, because about half the squad broke ranks and started doing just that before the sarge called them back.
The dead girl kept screaming, obscene noises that hurt me to hear and that made my stomach lurch. I don’t know what she said. I don’t know that I ever heard a language that could make a person sick, but she was doing it.
Crowley started speaking in low tones, exactly soft enough that I couldn’t make out any words clearly, and with each word he spoke the dead girl staggered backward as if struck. She stopped speaking and turned to screaming instead, holding her arms in front of her face as if to ward off savage blows, and perhaps she was, because the flesh on her arms rippled, peeling away from her bones, blistering and then burning into dust and ashes though there was no heat. The rest of her body soon followed suit, and in a space of ten seconds, her remains were gone, drifting away on a harsh wind that affected nothing else.
When she had vanished into nothingness, Crowley rose from his squat and shook his head. And he was smiling. His eyes looked almost feverish and his smile was broad enough that I feared it might actually split the skin of his lips.
A moment later he sobered and shook his head.
“I’m not sure what the Nazis summoned, but whatever it is, it doesn’t want to be found.”
He was speaking to the captain.
The captain did not answer. He stared at the spot where the little girl’s body had been standing on lifeless feet, and trembled.
I understood exactly how he felt.
Per the captain’s orders, we left the area, walking for another mile or more before he decided we were far enough away to safely make camp.
We left the bodies where we found them.
When we started walking. Crowley stayed behind for a while. No one questioned his decision. I don’t think anyone dared.
The deaths haunted us. We were in a war zone. We had all of us been shot at and either wounded or killed other people. I was twenty or so, as I recall it, but just like most of the guys with me, I didn’t really act it. We were too busy worrying about whether or not we would live to see home to goof around. Most of the time we had to scout out towns before we could consider entering them, because as much as we might have wanted to claim we were winning the war it didn’t feel that way. There were Germans everywhere and they seemed to be in control of nearly every town we encountered.
Through all of that, the deaths haunted us. They weren’t acts of violence in a kill or be killed situation. They were slow, methodical murder.
Everyone was on edge, except, of course, for Crowley.
He seemed more alive than he had been, more vibrant and more vital as if finding those massacred shapes had somehow made his world a little brighter. I won’t say he had a spring in his step and he sure as hell wasn’t whistling, but he moved differently and seemed lighter on his feet.
And he smiled all the goddamn time. Not always a full smile, not always bright and sunny, but it was like that nasty grin of his was lurking just under the surface and you could feel it there, waiting to pounce.
We managed two days of peace and quiet before things went south.
Early morning on the third day we were walking and we were doing our best to be quiet in the early-morning light of a cloudy day when a rifle shot blew the helmet right off the captain’s head and took half his brain with it. I remember looking at his helmet as it bounced across the dirt road and looking at the bullet hole right through the front of it and thinking that it shouldn’t have been there, and that there shouldn’t have been hair and red sticking to the inside of it either. I didn’t really register that he was dead; I just looked at the damned helmet and tried to understand what had gone wrong.
I would have died right then, but Crowley was there and he hauled me backward and threw me into a ditch right around the time something blew a crater in the spot where I’d been standing.
“Pay attention!” He roared the words at me and moved, crouching low and grinning as he moved across the road and looked toward the woods about fifty yards away.
They were there. You couldn’t see them, but the flash from their muzzles let us know they were trying to kill us.
A bullet took Lorenzo in his chest and blew out his back. That was bad because Lorenzo was a good guy. It was worse because that same bullet also took out the radio pack Lorenzo was wearing. Just that fast we were cut off from any possible assistance.
Fifty yards away, and I swear to you that Crowley was looking at them. His eyes scanned the woods too intently. He took his time as the ground let off puffs of dirt where bullets came too close and as the rest of us tried to find a good position to shoot from while keeping ourselves intact.
I had trouble looking away from Crowley. I yelled at him to get to cover, same as he had yelled at me, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Instead he stayed where he was until he spotted whatever it was he was looking for and then he ran straight for the woods.
I thought it strange the sarge didn’t yell until I saw the man slumped in the road, both hands on his stomach and a dark stain marking his jacket and shirt alike.