SNAFU: Hunters

None of my thoughts on the subject ever came close to what ripped itself from the cemetery. It knitted itself from the remains of the dead, clothed itself in the mud and the roots and the insects that feasted on the lifeless remains of a whole village.

There was a system to it. I remember thinking that even as I watched the demon heave itself from the groaning, whimpering ground. The bones and flesh of the dead tried to make themselves fit into a pattern that made sense, I suppose. The bodies tore themselves apart even as they ripped from the ground. From the smallest toe bone to the femurs, those bones collected in twin columns, rose from the ground like weeds stacking themselves into a misshapen mockery of legs. Mud and roots and blades of torn grass formed the muscles over a structure of bone, leaving much of the collected pillars of muck-crusted remains exposed.

Above that more skeletal remains crowded themselves together and pushed into a colossal form. It was not human, but it aped that form. A golem crafted from bone and filth, a giant with a head built from a cluster of skulls mashed together like grapes crushed in an angry hand.

It did not stand still as it was born. Like a living thing it writhed and squirmed. Like a monstrous, bloated deformed toddler, it staggered on clumsy legs and screamed its outrage to the world.

I screamed, too. Nothing in my life, not the war, not even the spectral forms of the Wild Hunt had ever prepared me for watching that abomination tear itself from the funereal womb.

That lump of a head was not a proper shape, but it hinted at what should have been. The deep cuts and broken earth formed a rudimentary face, hollows where eyes should have been, a bulge in the general shape that mimicked eyebrows. A gash for a mouth. That head turned and looked, the whole of the shape seeming to look toward me and then toward Crowley.

The thick, brutish appendage that closely mimicked an arm and a hand, swept up from the thing's side and crashed into Crowley, swatting him as easily as a grown man might slap aside an infant.

Crowley grunted and rolled through the air, his face battered into a new form, his body very obviously broken.

I did the only thing I could in that situation. I raised my rifle, took aim, and fired at the thing. My aim was good. Bone and muck snapped away from the shape in a small fountain, for all the good it did. I may as well have stabbed at a rock. One leg rose, ripping free from the earth in a cascade of severed plants and crushed headstone.

The shape came at me and opened its mouth; a low noise pumped from that opening, a wet sound that made me remember the bodies that never reached the shore at Normandy Beach.

I fired again with no noticeable effect, but to buy me time to stand.  I stepped back, looking around for any possible weapons that might be more useful, when Crowley came at the bone heap.

Crowley's face was bloodied. His clothes and his flesh covered in smears of mud. He should have been dead. I'd seen him hit by the thing and knocked aside as easily as a man struck by a runaway car. I’d seen his leg bent at an impossible angle, flopping as he rose higher into the air and then struck the ground.

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.