SNAFU: Hunters

“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.

When I was done with my brief description he stood and very slowly, carefully, scanned the area around us. He took his time and his eyes got a far off look.

As he looked, Crowley spoke to me. He said, “The world is full of things you don’t want to know about and even more that you never want to see. It always has been and likely always will be.”

“So monsters are real?”

His smile was not a pleasant thing. “Oh, yes, and some of them are even of the inhuman variety.”

I was puzzling that out when the first sounds came to us. They were distant, but not as far away as I would have hoped. Deep, throaty, rumblings came to us. Crowley frowned and I joined him. There are certain noises that stay with you forever, I think. Some of them are natural and some are not. This was a sound that lived in my nightmares for years, decades after the fact. This was the sound of a manmade monster.

There are folks I know who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every possible type of armament. There are kids in my neighborhood who, even today, can give you exhaustive details about the sort of fuel used, the number of rounds per second fired, et cetera. Here’s what I can tell you: the Panzer IV tank was a terror to behold.

I can’t quote the dimensions of the great, thundering thing that came at us from down the road.  All I can say is that it was larger than life and I wet myself when I saw it. One thing to see a tank go by in the distance, or to stand by one of the vehicles that is on your side in a war. Quite another to have a vehicle like that aiming for you.

There were four of them on the road, dwarfing the road, tearing the shit out of the sides of the road with their vast treads. The ground shook. The air shook. Our bodies shook as the damned things came our way.

I froze. I freely admit that. I took one look at what was coming our way and all thoughts left my head. They shouldn’t have, but they did.

All I wanted to do was hide. In addition to the tanks themselves, there were soldiers. So many, it seemed, that counting them all would be impossible. It was the perception, you understand. There were seven of us, including Crowley. Next to the tanks the soldiers seemed tiny, but they were there and we were grossly outnumbered.

  We should have never stayed on the road. Around the same time we heard them, we could see them. More importantly, they could see us.

  They did not check our credentials. They did not ask us to surrender. The Germans opened fire and a stream of bullets hit Januski and blew him into shreds.

That was enough to get the rest of us scattering. The tanks were scary as hell, but they also couldn’t turn and run as fast as we could. The weapons on them could do a fair impersonation, however, and they vomited lead and flames at a terrifying rate.

The ground shook. From time to time it exploded. Dirt and fire were everywhere and I had the fortune to manage not getting hit by anything as I ran for all I was worth.