SNAFU: Hunters

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.