There was blood on his face, but there were no wounds. There were shreds ripped from his uniform, likely spots where the bony ridges of a hundred jutting fingers had scraped cloth and then flesh away from the meat underneath. But there were no wounds.
Crowley was intact as he moved between me and the grave thing. Alive and smiling. He was enjoying himself. Madness!
The bone thing moved forward raising both malformed arms over its misshapen head.
“You should run! Now!” I knew Crowley wasn't talking to the beast.
Instead of listening I fired three more rounds into the thing. Bone exploded. Mud blossomed away. If there was pain, if there was injury worth noticing, it gave no sign.
Crowley turned toward me, an angered expression on his face. I could see the anger in his expression. I could tell the anger was because he was worried about whether or not I would live through the fight.
The anger faded and his eyes flew wide.
“Drop!” I didn't question him. I simply listened and flopped to the ground like a sack of rocks.
Just in time to watch the dead thing explode. I saw the streak of smoke. I saw the whole shape stagger a step to the left as something slammed into it. I watched the left side of the body bulge. Expanding outward in a sudden flare of fire.
That almost face took on a shocked look as the center of the beast exploded. Had it been alive the creature would surely have died. Instead it fell forward and caught itself on arms built from a hundred corpses as it bled mud and decay.
The world was still there, but my ears rang with a painful note. Debris covered me and my left arm was screaming at me, burning just below the elbow where the meat of my forearm was thickest. Blue afterimages eclipsed my vision, but I could see well enough to make out the shapes of soldiers coming at me from behind the veil of ghost shadows.
I checked my arm; a fragment of bone cut into the muscle. It was old, weathered and dirty, a part of the beast.
The bone golem tried to rise and Crowley stepped back and hurled a lump in its direction. Grenade. There was no doubt in my mind.
I dropped again as the creature exploded into several thick lumps.
Detritus flew everywhere. Muck and burnt, shattered bones, rocks, roots and squirming insects both intact and torn apart, arced away from the monstrous remains and scattered across the ground and both of us.
I have heard it said that in moments of stress the world slows down and I don’t think that’s really true, at least not for me. I think we simply take in so many details that in order to understand them we must focus on them so harshly that the world seems like it’s slowing. All I can say with any certainly is that the events did not seem slow to me. They were overwhelmingly fast. Only in hindsight could I clearly see what happened.
As the thing convulsed and exploded I saw something in the distance, a red shape. I did not see it clearly, and I did not see it well, but I remain convinced that I saw it, and that what I witnessed was not added later by my imagination. I saw it even as I was raising my arm to cover my face and protect my eyes.
I stared at the ruined thing and breathed hard. I wanted to look away but it was damned difficult. Crowley did not have that problem. He was looking back the way we’d come and he was scowling.
I finally looked that way as the rest of my squad came toward us. They were the reason we were alive. Crowley couldn’t have defended us at that time, I think. I know that I was getting nowhere.
Miller looked at me and shrugged. “Radio’s fried and Sarge is dead. We followed you.”
All I could do was nod. While that was going on Januski looked at the bleeding wound in my arm and pulled out what was left of his medic bag. I don’t imagine there was much after all he’d used on the sergeant, but he managed to find some gauze and a white powder that burned like hell while it allegedly disinfected my wound.
Crowley scowled as he looked around, trying to find out where to go next, I guess. He didn’t just look. He sniffed the air, examined the ground tasted the soil and finally nodded to himself.
“Good luck fellas.” He started gathering his things.
While he did that Nunnally let out a few choice words and backed away from the remains of the cemetery thing.
The dregs were moving, slowly sliding toward each other, bugs and bones and everything else. Nunnally bumped into Crowley as he was backing away and Crowley sneered at the remains.
I don’t know what he said. I don’t want to know. The words made me feel feverish and I could sense the power that came from them. All I know is that the effects were immediate. The bones in those moldering heaps caught fire. Some of them popped like firecrackers and others blazed hot and then hotter still until the light from them was nearly blinding; like flash paper thrown by a stage magician. And then they were gone, burned away into nothing more than fine ash that drifted up into the air and scattered with the wind.
Without another word Crowley started walking.
I followed him and my squad followed me.
Of all the things that went wrong in that war, that was the worst. My squad followed me. I thought I was doing the right thing following Crowley. I was so very wrong.
I’ll say this for him. Crowley did his best to discourage us without ever saying a word. He had a talent for scowling, tsking, sneering and generally being unhappy with being followed.
I was not to be discouraged. We had no radio. We had no commanders other than me. Frankly, I was looking toward Crowley to get us out of the insanity in one piece. As plans go it wasn’t much but it was all I had and I wanted nothing to do with being in charge.
So, yes, it falls on me.
We walked for two days without much of anything unusual aside from Crowley himself, who continued to hunt and stalk whatever it was he was searching for. He did not volunteer information.
Several times he left us behind, but I was good enough at tracking that I found him again, much to his disgust.
On the third day, as he was crouching low to the ground and staring at the way the dirt settled along the side of a narrow road, I asked him, “What are you hunting, Crowley?”
The sun was up, almost directly over our heads, and I remember him looking at me and shielding his eyes from the glare.
“Something made that thing we fought. The Nazis raised something with their sacrifices. I don’t know what. I have suspicions, but whatever the hell it is, it does not belong in this world and I aim to remove it before it can do any more harm.”
“How?”
“Same way it was brought here, I suppose. I’ll find out what it is and then I’ll get rid of it.” I could have been asking a stranger about the time of day. The only difference was that I’d have been asking a stranger in a bad mood. I don’t recall Crowley ever being in a good mood, really, except when he was fighting something. That was the only time he seemed genuinely pleased with his world.
I blinked back the wetness that stung at my eyes, hating what I thought of as weakness. Tears were for kids and for girls as far as I’d been told. I was nineteen and not wise enough to know any better. “How do those things exist?”
“You mean the monsters or the Nazis?”
“The thing that came from the ground. The red shape I saw. The people all cut up.”
“What red shape?” Crowley’s eyes instantly narrowed and his lips twitched.
I hadn’t thought much of the form in the distance. It was there, but like the monster made from the ones of the dead I was doing my best not to think about it. There wasn’t much to say, but I told Crowley just the same.
He nodded his head and then rolled his shoulders. “Well, that might make this a bit easier.” The look he shot me said otherwise and I felt a flash of shame because I had not told him about what I had seen earlier. There should have been no reason for my worries, but there was a pervasive sense that I had let the man down, as if I had been asked by my teacher to go to the chalkboard and then completely botched a simple question. Crowley was like that.