A Bunker Too Far by Newton Webb
A WW2 Horror Novella: A doomed mission. A Nazi bunker. A monstrous secret.
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A Bunker Too Far
By Newton Webb
Chapter One
Mud flew into the air.
Private Mike Taylor threw himself down. His Lee Enfield slammed against his chest knocking the breath from him. Wet earth filled his mouth. Somewhere ahead, a German machine gun hammered through the ancient pines, each burst tearing the forest apart in savage, ripping lines.
Branches cracked overhead. Splinters rained down through the mist. One struck the back of Mike’s hand hard enough to sting. He pressed his face into the muck and tried to make himself smaller.
Fletcher tried to crawl towards the ditch. The machine gun found him halfway there. His body jerked then collapsed into the mud.
Sergeant Davis’s steady voice cut through the racket. “Heads down, boys.” He sounded like he was on the parade ground.
Mike tried to move towards it.
Another burst chewed through the fallen oak ahead of him. Bark exploded outward. He flinched and froze, clutching his rifle so tightly that his knuckles hurt.
He moved back, running his numb fingers over his webbing, he felt the bronze cartridges in their stripper clips. He had two clips left.
Ten rounds.
Corporal Brown slid into cover near Davis, landing in the filth with a grunt. Even now, with soil streaked across his face and caught between his teeth, Brown managed to grin.
“Bit rough out here today, Sarge.”
A bit rough?
Mike didn’t understand how anyone could joke while bullets were hunting them through the trees.
“Still better than Belgium.” Davis’s face darkened. “Where are the others?”
There were ten of us when we jumped.
Evans had fallen past Mike, his chute never opened.
Clarke had broken his back across a tree branch. Mike had tried to drag him to cover until Brown shoved him aside and put a bullet through Clarke’s head, pocketed his identity disc, and dragged Mike back before the Germans reached him.
Now there were seven.
“Right behind me.”
Heavy footsteps pounded through the mud behind Brown. Private Tony Smith came crashing over a decaying log, huge and awkward, his broad frame hitting the ground with a thud. Tony curled against the wood, too large to hide properly behind it.
“Move over, Tony,” Brown said.
“Where to?” Tony replied. “This is the only cover.”
“Just breathe, Tony,” Davis said. “Move to that tree. We can’t afford to bunch up.”
Mike tried to move again. His boots slipped in the wet leaves. His helmet had twisted sideways, half blinding him. He pushed it back with one shaking hand and scrambled towards the ditch.
A hand seized the back of his webbing and dragged him the rest of the way.
Reed hauled him behind the fallen oak as bullets chewed across the top of the log. Mike landed hard on his side. Reed gave him a thumbs-up and managed half a smile before incoming fire forced him to turn away.
Jones put a steady hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Come on, lad. The Lord didn’t send you here to die.”
Mike nodded, though the one thing he was sure of was that the Lord was nowhere near Arnhem.
Davis pointed towards the right flank. “Cover us there.”
Mike raised his rifle. The barrel trembled. He forced it still and lifted his chin, mentally copying his father, the toughest man he knew. The forest ahead was a filthy smear of trunks, smoke, rain, and motion.
“Wait for the order,” Davis said.
Lance Corporal Williams crawled in last, dragging the wireless set by its thick canvas strap. The metal casing scraped over buried stones with a horrible grinding sound. Williams collapsed beside Davis, rolled onto his back, and patted the box.
“Bad news, Sergeant. Jerry shot the valves out. Just a twenty-pound brick now.”
The machine gun stopped.
The silence that followed was worse. Mike could feel his heart thudding in his chest. He had to force himself to breathe.
Reed was somewhere to Mike’s left, swearing as he tried to clear mud from his rifle bolt.
Mike heard his own breath, thin and wet. He heard rain ticking on leaves. He heard distant artillery somewhere beyond the trees.
Then two dark shapes sailed through the air.
Grenades.
One of the grenades landed beside Reed.
Mike ducked, curled around his rifle, and clamped his eyes shut. The explosions punched the world flat. Soil and rotten leaves slapped across his helmet and neck. The blast shoved air from his lungs.
For a moment, everything became a high, whining ring.
He forced his eyes open and found dark red blood coating the ground, his sleeves, and his webbing. Reed was no longer behind the oak. What was left of him was spread over the blast site.
Mike screamed, his voice shrill in the forest gloom.
“Prepare for incoming assault.” Davis looked at what was left of Reed. His jaw tightened. His hand instinctively went to his breast pocket, his thumb stroking it before he turned back to the trees.
Davis had his Sten braced over the log. Brown was beside him with the Thompson ready. Tony shifted the Bren into position. Jones raised his rifle, calm despite the chaos.
Mike was still staring at Reed.
Something landed on his helmet.
“Focus, boy.”
Mike yelped and twisted round. Brown was glaring at him. Mike’s arms were clutched to his chest, his rifle forgotten in the mud.
“Aim your rifle at Jerry,” Brown snarled. “We all fight, or we all die.”
Heart pounding, Mike grabbed his rifle and took aim. The barrel would not stay still.
Dark green uniforms flickered between the trees.
Germans.
They charged through the gloom at a run.
“Open fire.” Davis’s Sten chattered sharply. Brown’s Thompson joined in with a heavier thunder. Tony’s Bren thumped beside them, loud enough to shake Mike’s ribs. Jones fired once, worked the bolt, and fired again.
Mike aimed at a shape between two pines.
The front sight wavered across a German’s chest, shoulder, and face, then vanished into fog.
He pulled the trigger.
The rifle kicked into him. He didn’t know if he’d hit anything.
A German spun and fell, but it could have been shot by Davis, Brown, Jones, anyone. Mike worked the bolt, aiming at the next silhouette. His fingers felt thick and stupid.
Another German fell backwards with a dark hole where one eye had been.
The attack broke.
The surviving Germans disappeared into the trees.
Mike kept aiming long after there was nothing left to aim at. His shoulder ached. His mouth tasted of metal and mud. He waited for them to come back. He was certain they would.
“Report,” Davis said.
Mike lowered his rifle only when the others did.
Brown checked his Thompson. “Half a mag here. Two spares.”
“Eight rounds,” Mike said.
He hated the sound of his own voice. It shook like a boy’s.
“I’ve ten,” Jones said.
Tony patted the Bren. “One full box. That’s all.”
That’s thirty rounds.
Mike looked at the men around him. Their uniforms were soaked through with rain and sweat. Their faces were grey with mud.
Operation Market Garden had been chaos. The rendezvous point had been overrun and the Germans were between them and the rest of the British airborne force. Their wireless was dead.
And Mike had eight rounds in the rifle.
“We need to link back up with the main force,” Brown said. He checked the chamber on his Thompson. “I say we push north. Try to flank them. Catch them off guard.”
Davis shook his head. “We don’t know where the main force is. We’re blind out here.”
“And deaf,” Williams said. He kicked the broken wireless. “Unless someone has a spare set of valves in his pocket.”
Mike looked through the trees, hoping to see British uniforms, anything familiar. There was only mist thickening between the trunks.
Davis stood slowly and scanned the canopy.
Mike followed his gaze.
At first, he saw nothing but branches and grey sky. Then the mist shifted.
Metal angles jutted above the trees.
“Look up there,” Davis said.
Brown squinted. “A radio mast.”
“Camouflaged netting over the base,” Davis said. “German bunker. Looks like a forward observation post.”
Mike’s stomach tightened.
Williams dragged himself up and peered through the wet foliage. “If it’s a command post, they’ll have a working transmitter. I could rip the parts out. Fix our set.”
“Or we use theirs to broadcast.” Brown clapped Williams on the shoulder. “What do you say, Williams?”
Williams wiped mud from his cheek. “Not so keen on storming a bunker. They probably have a lot more bullets than we do.”
Mike wanted Davis to say no. He wanted the sergeant to order them away from it, back through the forest, anywhere except towards that hard shape in the fog.
Davis looked at each of them.
When his eyes reached Mike, Mike straightened.
“We have to take it,” Davis said. “German armour is moving towards the flank. Our boys are walking into an ambush. We get that radio working. We send a warning. It’s our duty.”
Mike gripped his rifle tighter. “Just the six of us?”
He wished the words back as soon as he said them.
Brown glanced at him.
“Just the six of us.” Davis put a firm hand on his shoulder. “You stick close to Smith. Jones, watch the rear. Brown, you and I take point.”
Mike nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
Brown checked his gear one last time. His eyes gleamed as he grimaced at the bunker. “Right then.” Brown raised his Thompson. “Let’s go give Jerry a proper greeting.”
Jones crossed himself.
“Just make sure your sights are level,” Williams muttered, unslinging his rifle.
Tony forced himself up. He rolled his massive shoulders. His face had gone tight. “I’m ready, Sergeant.”
Mike was close enough to hear the lie in it. He felt the same.
Davis checked the action on his Sten and stepped out from behind the safety of the oak.
Tony clapped Mike on the back. “Don’t worry, mate. You and me, we’ll stick together.” When he remained stock-still Tony gave him a nudge. “Come on, before Sarge sees you.”
Mike’s legs were stiff as he followed his brothers. He could hear Tony behind him, close enough to touch the back of his webbing. Mud sucked at him and roots caught his toes as he limped, terrified, through the trees.
Artillery had torn the forest into a jagged ruin. Craters opened between the trees, their bottoms filled with brown water. Splintered trunks bristled against the sky. Mist clung to the ground and swirled around their legs.
Twigs snapped like rifle shots.
Stumps loomed in the mist like crouching Germans.
Mike kept his weapon raised and tried not to think about the eight rounds in the rifle.
Brown moved to Davis’s right, fast and eager, a grim smile fixed to his face. Jones stayed behind them, checking the rear. Williams kept looking up at the radio mast as it vanished and reappeared in the shifting fog.
They reached the edge of a huge blast crater. Water pooled at the bottom, slick with oil and floating leaves. The air smelled of wet soil, burning rubber, and smoke.
“Around the edge,” Davis whispered. “Keep your footing.”
Mike stepped where Tony had stepped.
The mud gave way.
His boot slid out from under him and he lurched down the slope. Panic flashed hot through his chest. He clawed at the mud with one hand, his rifle clutched uselessly in the other.
Tony caught him by the collar and hauled him back up as if Mike weighed nothing.
“Careful, Mike,” Tony muttered. “You break your neck and you’ll put Jerry out of a job.”
Mike grabbed for his rifle. Its wooden stock felt reassuringly firm in his hands.
“Thanks mate.” Mike scrubbed the muck from his face, his cheeks burning.
They continued through the devastated forest. The bunker slowly emerged from the fog.
At first, it was only a darker shape among dark trees. Then Mike saw the concrete dome, low and ugly beneath tattered camouflage netting. Coils of barbed wire wrapped around the perimeter. Two firing slits faced the woods. Machine gun barrels poked out from the blackness inside them.
Mike stopped breathing.
“Stay low.” Davis dropped into a crouch and crept closer.
A German soldier lay tangled in the wire ahead.
Mike saw the boots first. Then the uniform. Then the chest, marked by a neat bullet hole.
God in heaven.
The man had no head.
His stomach lurched. Mike looked away, then looked back because he could not stop himself. The corpse hung in the barbs as if the wire had caught him trying to escape the bunker.
Crows scattered from the body and burst into the air, screaming.
Davis froze and raised a closed fist, looking at the bunker through his binoculars.
Mike stopped dead. His whole body locked.
Davis lowered his fist.
Mike breathed again, silently at first, then in one shaking sip of air.
They crawled forward. The sour stench of death grew stronger near the wire.
Williams pulled heavy wire cutters from his webbing. He snapped the bottom strand. The released wire gave a soft ping that made Mike flinch. Williams cut another, then another, and pulled the barbs back to make a narrow gap.
“I don’t like this, Sarge,” Williams whispered. “Where are the sentries? You’d think they’d have heard the firefight.”
Mike looked at the firing slits.
Nothing moved behind them.
“Steady, lad,” Davis whispered. “Our boys are giving it to them all over Arnhem. Plenty of noise to distract them.”
Davis went first, sliding through the gap on his belly. Brown followed. Then Tony crouched and forced himself through, the wire scraping across his pack.
Mike went after him.
A barb caught his sleeve. Jones reached in, eased the cloth free, and gave him a gentle shove.
Inside the wire, the bunker seemed larger. Colder. Its concrete wall rose from the mud. The firing slits stared over the forest, black and empty.
Davis pressed his back against the bunker wall.
Mike crouched behind Tony and tried to listen past the ringing in his ears.
At first, he heard only distant artillery.
Then something else.
Music.
It came from below them, thin, crackling, and beautiful.
Mike knew it was opera because his mother had taken him once before the war. He had not been able to see anything from the back of the cheap seats, but he recognised the music.
Brown stood close behind Davis, Thompson tight to his chest, eyes wide and bright.
Davis raised his fist. He reached for a grenade.
Mike tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.
Davis slipped his finger through the metal ring, pulled the pin, and hurled the grenade through the firing slit. “Down.”
Mike dropped flat against the wet soil.
The grenade exploded inside the bunker with a brutal crack. Dust coughed from the firing slit. The wall trembled against Mike’s shoulder.
When his ears stopped ringing, he could still hear the opera playing.
It was louder now.
Chapter Two
Davis opened his fist.
Brown was up at once, moving along the wall with his Thompson tight against his shoulder, boots slipping in the muck. Davis followed, Sten ready.
Tony grabbed Mike by the back of his webbing and hauled him upright. “Move.”
They rounded the bunker wall in a low rush. The entrance was recessed behind a slab of concrete and half covered by torn camouflage netting. Sandbags lay scattered outside it, many split open and spilling wet grey sand into the mud. A German helmet rested upside down near the doorway. Rainwater had gathered inside it.
Brown went through first, fast and low, his Thompson sweeping the area.
Mike stumbled after Tony into smoke and dust. Concrete steps led down, the air was thick with the coppery scent of blood. He gagged at the foul scent.
Tony stopped on the step ahead of him. His huge shoulders tightened.
“You all right?” Mike whispered.
Tony didn’t answer. Instead, he pressed on, following the others down the stairs until they reached the bottom. As they descended, the music grew louder.
The corridor ran left and right at the bottom of the stairs. Painted arrows on the wall pointed left and right, each labelled in German.
Williams pointed at one of the arrows pointing right. “Sarge, I’m fairly certain that Funkraum is Kraut for radio.”
Davis nodded and led them down the right-hand passage, towards the music.
A low concrete corridor stretched beneath the bunker lit by yellow bulbs. Most still worked. Some hung dead in their fittings, leaving pockets of shadow.
Germans lay everywhere.
One had been torn open from throat to belly, the ribs snapped outward. Another hung halfway through a doorway, his boots scraping the floor. A third sat propped against the wall with both arms missing. The heads had not been cut away cleanly. Ragged cords of flesh hung from the necks, as if something had twisted until the bones gave. Their heads had been thrown aside. They stared from the base of the wall with open mouths and dead eyes.
Mike had seen men die that morning. Friends, even. Fletcher. Reed. Clarke. But this was different. He bent and vomited onto the floor.
Jones stepped past him and covered the corridor, rifle steady. “Get it out, lad. Then stand up.”
Tony put one hand on his back, but his own eyes were fixed on the corridor.
“Christ.” Brown’s grin was gone.
Jones crossed himself.
Davis moved slowly and silently down the corridor, weapon raised.
Blood had dried in long smears down the walls. Some dragged low, as if men had crawled through it. Others were higher, at shoulder height, hand height, and head height. One door had been ripped clean from its hinges and thrown across the corridor. The steel was buckled inward.
“No one fires unless I give the word.” Davis’s eyes narrowed. “Watch the doorways.” His gaze moved to the heads along the wall. “Close ranks.”
Brown kept his Thompson raised. “Easy lads, Jerry are bastards. Bloodthirsty bastards. That’s all. You’ve heard the rumours.”
Jones started to cross himself again, then stopped halfway through. “Sarge, these men should have words said over them.”
“Later.” Davis’s voice was strained, his jaw tight.
Williams crouched beside the door. “No bullet strikes or blast marks.” He ran his fingers over the torn hinge, then looked at the concrete wall beside the frame. “Grenades didn’t do this.”
Tony touched one of the gouges with his finger. “Too deep for bayonets.”
Davis moved on.
Mike followed Tony through the corridor, stepping around German bodies, loose equipment, and smears of drying blood. His boots stuck to the floor in places. Each soft pull of leather from concrete made his stomach tighten.
A door stood open on the left. A label above it said, ‘Versuchsraum.’
White tiles showed beyond it. A medical room, perhaps, or a laboratory.
Davis raised his fist.
Everyone stopped.
Brown leaned towards the opening, Thompson ready. His easy grin had long since disappeared. “Sergeant…”
Davis stepped to the doorway.
Mike could not help looking past him.
The cold room was long and narrow, lit by buzzing incandescent bulbs that flickered with a sickly yellow light. The walls were tiled white from floor to ceiling. Dark blood had sprayed across them in wild fans, drying into black-red arcs. It reeked of sharp formaldehyde, metallic blood, and the sweet, heavy rot of open bowels.
The room was dominated by more than twenty gurneys in two rows.
Every one of them had a man strapped to it.
They were naked. Their wrists and ankles had been bound to the frames with leather straps. Some had twisted hard enough to tear the skin beneath the buckles. Some had pulled until their joints sat wrong. Some lay still with their fingers locked tight, frozen halfway into a fist. Despite the temperature, flies had found their way to the corpses and clustered around their soft tissue and injured flesh.
None of them had heads. The heads weren’t scattered nearby. They were just… gone.
Davis looked down the rows of gurneys. His mouth moved once, but no order came.
The sound of the soprano climbed somewhere further down the corridor, absurdly beautiful above the stink of blood.
These bodies were different from the ones in the corridor. These had been laid out with precision and the heads had been removed cleanly.
Yet the surgical trays had been overturned. Scalpels, clamps, needles, and broken glass lay scattered across the floor. A German in full medical scrubs was dead in the corner, his head torn free like the rest of his garrison.
Jones stepped into the room, then stopped. His lips moved in a silent litany.
Williams went to the nearest gurney. Flies erupted into the air, buzzing angrily at the intrusion. He held his rifle in one hand and pulled a torch from his webbing with the other. The beam shook once before he steadied it.
“There’s writing on them,” he said.
Davis came closer. “Where?”
Williams pointed.
Mike forced himself to look.
On the left upper chest of the nearest body, just below the collarbone, numbers had been tattooed into the skin in black ink.
The bodies had been marked with serial numbers.
“This isn’t a field hospital.” Williams moved the torch from body to body. “They’ve all been labelled, Sarge. Every single one has a serial number.”
Brown spat on the tiles. “Bastards.”
The word sounded too small for the desecration of the bodies.
Davis walked between the gurneys, slow and careful. His Sten stayed raised, but his eyes kept dropping to the bodies. Mike saw the sergeant’s jaw tighten. “We can’t stay here. We have to move on.”
Mike stared at the tattooed numbers.
He thought of Clarke’s identity disc in Brown’s pocket. Fletcher and Reed’s identity discs in Davis’s pocket.
Eight rounds left.
Six men left.
Twenty bodies.
He was breathing too fast. A leather strap creaked.
Mike jerked his rifle up and fired, the round punched into the wall.
The room erupted into motion as the soldiers spun, searching for the attack.
“Sorry. Sorry,” Mike muttered.
Brown marched over, grabbed the front of Mike’s smock, and hauled him close. “Pull yourself together, Private.”
“Enough.” Davis gripped Brown’s shoulder and forced him back. His eyes stayed on Mike. “Breathe. Rifle down. We find the radio, warn the regiment, then get out.”
Brown glared at Mike. “Waste another round and you lose some teeth.”
Seven rounds.
“Why cut off the heads?” Williams was backing up against the wall. “Were they experimenting on them?”
Tony looked at the raw stumps where the heads should have been and shrugged. “Someone doesn’t want them getting back up.”
No one answered.
Davis looked away first. “We move.”
“Good. Enough of this.” Brown walked towards the door. “Let’s get moving, ladies.”
Williams didn’t follow. He stood beside the numbered cupboards, one hand still on the handle of the lock he had forced open.
“Williams,” Davis snapped. “Radio room.”
Williams turned. All the colour had gone from his face. “But Sarge.”
“I found the heads.”
Chapter Three
From somewhere deeper in the bunker, the opera continued to crackle through the concrete. The voice rose, strident and mournful.
Williams opened the cupboard doors.
Row upon row of heads stared out from jars of embalming fluid. Each label had been written in the same neat cursive hand.
Why?
Davis’s eyes widened. He shook his head. “Leave them.” His gaze lingered a moment, disobeying his own order, before he followed Brown.
Mike followed the others into the corridor. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and realised he was crying. He rubbed the tears away before Brown could see.
A noise came from somewhere ahead.
Everyone froze.
Davis motioned for them to continue and together they moved deeper into the bunker, the opera growing louder with each step.
It came from ahead, from behind a sealed door at the end of a short side passage. The door was heavier than the others, dark green steel set into a reinforced concrete frame.
Brown tried the door.
Locked.
He pressed his ear close. “Music’s behind here.”
Davis stepped to the viewing hatch and lifted it.
Mike saw only a sliver past his shoulder. A desk. A lamp. A wall map. Smoke lingering in the air. The shining horn of a gramophone, looming over a turning disc, beside the desk.
Then Davis went rigid. “German officer,” he whispered. “Alive.”
Brown’s grin came back, but it was thin and ugly. “Then let’s ‘ave him.”
Davis lowered the hatch. “Brown, the lock.”
Brown shot the lock with a short burst from his Thompson. Then he kicked the door. On the third kick, the chair wedged beneath the handle shattered and the door burst inward. He surged through with Davis.
“Hands up!” Davis shouted.
Mike followed Tony into the room, rifle raised.
The office was immaculate.
After the gore-slicked tiles of the medical room, the commander’s perfectly stacked files and softly glowing banker’s lamp made Mike’s skin crawl. Files sat stacked on shelves and maps covered the walls. A green banker’s lamp glowed on the desk. The gramophone played beside it, needle scratching over the record.
A German commander sat behind the desk.
He wore a field-grey tunic with the collar open. His face was pale, unshaven, and slick with sweat. One eye twitched. His trembling left hand rested on an open, leather-bound journal, his thumb compulsively stroking the edge of a silver-framed photograph of a blonde woman and a young boy. A half-empty crystal glass of schnapps sat at his elbow. His right hand held a Luger to his temple.
Everyone stopped. For one second, nobody spoke.
The German looked at them, his red-rimmed eyes were dull behind circular glasses.
Davis stepped forward. “Don’t.”
The commander managed an apologetic smile before he pulled the trigger.
The shot cracked through the office.
Mike flinched so hard his rifle jerked upward.
The German collapsed sideways in his chair. Blood struck the wall map behind him and ran down across the paper roads and rivers of Holland.
Brown swore and crossed the room. “Coward.” He kicked the Luger away from the commander’s hanging hand.
Davis moved to the desk. He didn’t touch the body. His eyes instead went to the journal.
Mike came closer despite himself, peering at the book.
The handwriting inside was dense, jagged, and hurried. Lines had been scratched out so hard the nib had torn the paper. Several pages were stained with old fingerprints. Brown marks. Rust-coloured.
Williams lifted the gramophone needle. The opera died with a soft scrape.
The silence that followed seemed enormous.
Mike heard his own breathing again. Tony’s too. Somewhere water dripped through concrete.
Davis turned a page of the journal with the muzzle of his Sten.
Mike saw one word repeated again and again among the German script.
‘Waffe.’
Mike swallowed. “Sarge, it says weapon.”
Davis looked from Mike to the dead commander. “What weapon?”
Brown turned on him. “And since when do you speak Kraut?”
Mike realised they were all looking at him. “I only know bits.”
“Yeah, but German bits?” Brown asked.
“My father runs an engineering firm.” Mike swallowed. “He made me learn it. I didn’t get very far though. Said German was the language of engineers.”
“Well, he’s bloody wrong.” Brown stared at him for another second. “British engineering is the best in the world, everyone knows that.”
Davis pulled a set of keys from the commander’s belt.
From behind them, somewhere back along the passage, a man began sobbing in German.
They followed the sound back into the corridor. The sobbing came from a storage room with its door hanging open by one hinge.
Davis raised two fingers and pointed to it.
Brown moved left. Tony raised the Bren. Jones took the rear. Williams crouched beside a wall smeared with old blood.
Someone was curled inside the storage room, whispering through broken sobs.
Davis stepped into the doorway. “Hands up.”
A man screamed.
Brown surged in and dragged him out by the collar. The young German came with him, thin, filthy, and shaking. He wore the field grey uniform of an enlisted soldier, but the jacket was torn open and dark with dried blood. A bandage, black at the edges, had been wrapped around his left forearm.
He hit the floor and scrambled backwards until his shoulders struck the wall.
“Bitte,” he gasped. “Bitte nicht. Nicht dorthin. Nicht zu ihr.”
Brown aimed the Thompson at the German’s chest. “What’s he saying?”
The German’s eyes were sunk deep in his face. His lips were cracked. He smelled of stale sweat and urine. He looked past all of them, towards the deeper corridor.
“Das Mädchen,” he whispered. “Das Mädchen ist hungrig.”
“The girl is hungry,” Mike translated.
The German grabbed at Davis’s trouser leg. “Nicht öffnen. Bitte. Sie ist kein Kind.”
Davis looked down at him. “Taylor?”
“He says ‘Don’t open it.’” Mike looked along the corridor, towards the music and the blood. “He says she’s no child.”
Brown snorted. “He’s hiding something.”
Williams knelt beside the German. “Name?”
The German licked his split lips. “Adler. Fritz Adler. Gefreiter.”
“Private,” Mike said.
Adler began shaking his head. “Das Mädchen ist hungrig!”
“How many more Germans?” Davis spoke slowly.
Adler only shook his head. “Das Mädchen. Das Mädchen.”
Davis’s face hardened. “Bind him.”
Brown pulled out a length of cord.
Adler started crying. “Nein!” He scrabbled backwards.
Brown booted him in the ribs. “Hands!”
Davis turned. His voice went cold. “Corporal.”
“Hände!” Mike flinched at the brutality.
Brown showed his teeth, then grabbed Adler’s wrists and bound them tight. “I’m pretty sure he understood me, Mike. That’s the same bloody word.” He glowered at the German. “Isn’t that right, Jerry?”
They left Adler tied beside the storage room. He sobbed as they moved away from him.
The corridor ended at a reinforced steel door set deeper into the concrete than the others. It had bolts across the outside and a square viewing hatch at eye level. The metal around the frame was scarred with long gouges.
Davis stepped forward and opened the hatch.
Inside the cell, sitting neatly on a narrow cot with her hands folded in her lap, was a girl. She couldn’t have been more than eleven. Her hair was dark and matted. Her dress was filthy. A yellow star had been stitched to the torn fabric at her chest. She sat barefoot, her skin waxy and faintly yellow in the weak electric light.
“So this is the monster the Kraut was babbling about?” Williams regarded her cynically.
Her eyes lifted.
“Hallo.”
Chapter Four
The girl sat on the narrow cot beyond the hatch, hands folded in her lap. Her dark eyes looked up at Mike. Her bare feet hung above the floor, small and pale beneath the hem of her filthy dress. The yellow star on her chest had been sewn on with small, careful stitches.
Mike stared at it.
He had heard rumours from the other soldiers. He knew what the star meant, but knowing did not prepare him for seeing it on a child in a locked German cell.
She was eleven, perhaps twelve, but hunger made it hard to tell, leaving her with gawky, thin arms and hollow cheeks. Her hair was clumped against her face. Her skin was pale beneath the yellow electric light. Her eyes were large and dark.
She was watching him watch her.
“Hallo.” Her voice was soft, polite even as she repeated herself.
Davis kept one eye on the hatch. “Can you understand me?”
The girl blinked.
“That’s not right.” Brown stood behind him with the Thompson held across his chest. “I can’t believe even Jerry would lock up a little girl.”
Jones lowered his rifle and raised his hands. “Poor thing. This is ungodly.” He lowered himself into a crouch, palms open. “Easy now. No one here will hurt you.” He reached into his webbing and pulled out a chocolate bar. “Here, girl. Look what I’ve got.”
“She’s a girl, not a dog, you idiot.” Brown pulled out a photo from his jacket. “You’re safe here, love. Look, here’s me with my little girl. We’re English, we don’t hurt little ’uns.”
She looked at the photo, expressionless.
“She’s traumatised, poor little mite.” Brown took the chocolate bar from Jones. “Nobody is going to hurt you.” He offered her the bar. She shook her head. “Taylor, you prat. Tell her we won’t hurt her.”
Mike bit his lip. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
She shook her head.
He tried again. “Wir sind deine Freunde. Wir sind sehr gut. Die Deutschen sind tot.”
She tilted her head, her brow furrowing.
“I only know some German. I’m not fluent.”
Brown shook his head at Mike. “Wonderful, so you could be speaking absolute gibberish.”
“Wie heißt du? Ich bin Mike.” Mike pointed at his chest.
“Ich heiße Anka.” The girl’s gaze flicked downwards.
“Her name is Anka,” Mike translated.
“She’s frightened,” Jones said.
“I gathered all of that, you plums.” Brown turned his head. “Thank you for your valuable input, I don’t know how the British Army survived before you joined us.”
“That’s enough, Brown.” Davis tapped Jones on the shoulder. “For now, Jones, you guard Anka’s cell. The rest of you, close up. We haven’t cleared the bunker yet.”
“Sarge? Shouldn’t we let her out?” Jones asked.
“This is the British Army, son. We aren’t nannies.” Brown sneered. “Follow your orders.”
Davis led the squad back out into the corridor. He stopped outside the commander’s office. “Williams, radio room.”
Williams nodded towards the sign they had passed earlier. “This way.”
The Funkraum lay beyond a narrow junction, behind a half-open door scarred by bullets. Inside, the air smelled of dust, blood, and burned wiring. A German wireless set occupied most of one wall, built into a heavy desk with dials, switches, headphones, and a black microphone mounted on a curved stand. Maps had been pinned beside it. A frequency chart hung crookedly from one nail.
The operator’s body sat under the table. His head lay in the corner, beside a snapped pencil.
Tony turned sideways to enter. His shoulders brushed the frame. His breathing quickened.
Mike saw him glance back towards the stairs.
“You all right, Tony?” Mike asked.
Tony nodded too quickly. “Don’t mind the bodies, just wish it wasn’t so cramped.”
Williams went straight to the wireless set, forgetting his fear. He leaned over the equipment, fingers moving across switches, cables, and cracked casing. He opened panels with a screwdriver. He sniffed the inside of one box, grimaced, and pulled out a blackened valve. “Good news.”
Brown looked at the dead operator. “There’s good news?”
“Set’s broken, but probably fixable.” Williams pointed to a cracked glass valve and a bundle of cut wiring. “Somebody damaged this in a hurry. Accident, I’d say.”
“If I can cannibalise our set and find a few spares in here, we should be okay.” Williams looked at a gauge on the wall. “Power’s still live. Assuming the mast connection is intact, it’s looking hopeful.”
Williams crouched and began pulling tools from his webbing. “I’ll need a few hours at least if God loves us. More if he’s indifferent. If he’s in one of his Old Testament moods, then we’re right royally buggered.”
Jones scowled at him.
Brown looked at the corridor. “Doubt Jerry is going to give us hours, mate.”
“We work with what we have.” Davis patted Williams on the shoulder. “Do your best. Tony, guard the bunker entrance. I want eyes on the woods.”
Tony nodded. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“You see movement, you call down. Do not engage unless they’re on top of you,” Davis warned.
Tony nodded and moved towards the stairs with the Bren held tight.
Davis looked at Mike. “Taylor, stay close.”
The barracks were the next room along the left-hand corridor.
Davis booted open the door and stood back. Brown stormed the room with Jones.
The smell came out first.
Mike gagged before he saw anything. Rotting food, blood, sweat, and latrines.
The barracks had once held twenty or thirty men. Metal bunks lined the walls in two high rows. Boots stood neatly beneath some beds. Uniform jackets hung from hooks. Playing cards lay scattered across a small table. A tin mug had rolled onto its side staining the floor beneath it.
The men themselves were everywhere.
One lay folded beneath a bunk, legs sticking out at an impossible angle. Another had been shoved headfirst into a locker. Several were piled near the far door, as if they had tried to get out at once and had died blocking one another’s escape. Sheets hung in strips from the bed frames. Blood had soaked into mattresses and pooled beneath them.
A bare foot twitched gently in a draft. Mike stabbed at the body with his rifle. When it stayed dead, he moved on.
There was one untouched bed near the corner. Its blanket was neatly folded, its pillow square, and a pair of polished boots carefully aligned beneath it. Mike stared at them.
“We have weapons.” Brown pulled open a weapons locker, his voice gleeful. “Kraut crap, but they still shoot bullets in roughly the right direction. Plenty of ammo.”
Kar98ks.
“Grenades too.” Brown opened boxes lined with straw at the bottom of the locker, revealing rows of stick grenades.
The last room to clear was the canteen. It lay beyond a pair of double doors near the centre of the bunker.
It was a long room with three metal tables bolted to the floor, benches on either side, a serving counter, shelves, a stove, a sink, and a row of cupboards. A pipe rattled somewhere overhead. The lights flickered but held.
Two dead Germans lay near the serving counter. One had been thrown against the stove hard enough to dent the metal. The other was slumped by the sink with his head missing and one hand still gripping the tap. Water dripped steadily over his dead fingers.
Davis looked at the two doors, the bolted tables, and the serving counter. “This’ll do.”
Brown grinned. “Civilisation.”
“This room has bodies in it,” Mike muttered.
Davis tossed the commanders key’s to him. “So it does. Right, you lot toss them into the barracks, then I’ll get a brew on. Mike, tell Jones to bring the girl here. Bunker’s clear enough for now. I’m not leaving a child in a Nazi cell. Put the German in there instead. Then take one of the German rifles and three stripper clips to Jones and Smith while you’re at it.”
Brown slapped his hands together. “A proper brew. I could murder a stiff cuppa.” Brown slung the Thompson and grabbed the first corpse by the collar. “Taylor. Help me.”
Mike slung his rifle and took the dead man’s boots. They dragged him across the floor, leaving a dark smear behind.
He tried not to look at the missing head.
They carried both bodies into the barracks. When they returned, Davis had already checked the cupboards.
“Don’t think much of the German rations, so we’ll stick to our own for now. Tea’s on, though, and I’ve washed up some mugs.” He held up a dented tin cup. “Wash your hands, you savages, and then come and join me.” A black kettle was steaming on a gas burner.
Brown wiped his hands on his smock. “Finally, someone let me into The Ritz.”
Mike looked wistfully at the kettle before returning to the barracks to sling three rifles over his shoulder and gathered a stack of ammo.
He found Jones outside the cell, one hand resting on the bolt and the other closed around the chocolate bar Anka had refused.
“Bunker is secure. Sarge says she can come with us now.” Mike handed him a rifle, pulling three clips out of his webbing. “Kar98k.”
“The Lord provides!” Jones looked over the rifle, loading it and pulling the first round into the breech. “Thank you, Taylor.” He grinned through the hatch at the girl. “Good news, girl. You are free!”
“Nee!” She scrabbled back to the corner of the room.
“Nee?” Mike looked confused. “She’s got an odd accent. Es ist okay, Anka. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
“Nee,” she whispered. Then louder. “Nee, nee, nee.”
The girl shrank back against the concrete, pulling her knees tight to her chest, her breathing quick and shallow.
“She thinks we’re going to hurt her,” Mike said.
“We aren’t going to hurt you.” Jones held out his hands to placate her. “But, I’m sorry my dear, orders are orders.” He unlocked the door using the commander’s key. “Please, you must come with us. It isn’t safe for you to be alone down here.”
Anka curled up in the corner, her arms around her knees.
“Anka…” Jones looked torn. “Anka!”
“Bitte, Anka.” Mike reached for her. “Komm mit.”
With tears in her eyes, she reluctantly took his hand. He lifted her up. She was heavier than she looked. Far heavier. Mike had to brace one boot against the frame before he could lift her clear.
“I’ll get the Kraut, put him in the cell.” Jones held the door for Mike.
Williams stayed with the radio. Smith guarded the entrance. The rest of the squad settled in the canteen, exhausted.
As Mike entered, Davis pointed. “She sits there. Away from the door, where we can watch her.”
Mike put her down delicately on a bench.
Anka curled her legs underneath herself. Her eyes followed the dark smear the German bodies had left across the floor.
Mike felt like he could sleep for a month. The bulbs flickered above them. Mike looked up nervously. Then smiled gratefully as Brown passed him a tin mug.
“Milk’s gone off, so you get to drink it black, like a proper soldier.” Brown sipped at his tea, smacking his lips with satisfaction. “Go on then, Mike, what age were you when you enlisted?”
Mike paused, then said, “Nineteen, Corporal.”
Brown nodded sagely. “And how many years have you been nineteen?”
Chatter died down and the squad looked at him curiously.
Mike considered lying, but then quietly confessed, “Two and a bit, Corporal.”
“You should be in the Home Guard, son.” Davis leaned forward. “Why lie and put yourself in danger?”
“I’ve got family, Sarge.” Mike paused. “I couldn’t protect them by guarding orchards back at home, could I?” He looked down.
“Well, well, well.” Brown was looking at him. “I’d say we have a problem here.”
“Corporal?”
Is he really going to report me? In the middle of Arnhem?
“Sarge, don’t know if you’ve noticed, but little Mike over there is covered in Jerry.” Brown looked at him pointedly.
Mike looked around. Most of the squad had bloodstains on their uniforms. “I’m sorry, I don’t have a spare uniform, none of us do.”
Brown continued to look at him.
“Sarge?”
Davis tapped his mug thoughtfully.
“Sorry, I… Sorry.” Mike tried to think of a suitable response. “I could wash my smock, I guess, but what if we get attacked? It would be sodden.”
“The answer to this is obvious to any man with military experience, even someone who is a bit younger than his paperwork would suggest.” Brown nodded at Davis. “Wouldn’t you say, Sarge?”
Davis nodded. “Quite right, Corporal. Perhaps you’d like to fill in young Private Taylor with the correct procedure for maintaining your uniform during combat operations?”
“With pleasure, Sarge. When one finds himself covered in Nazi, he is required to wash off that NAZI filth and then…” Brown took a deep breath, then sang in his South London accent. “We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.”
The squad erupted into laughter. Once Mike realised he’d been teased, he joined in. The explosive release of tension felt cathartic. “Whether the weather may be wet or fine, we’ll just rub along without a care!” He pointedly avoided looking at the blood stains in the room.
Anka watched them sing with frightened confusion, as if she had been locked in a room with madmen.
The squad had just started on the second verse when Tony’s Bren opened up at the top of the stairs. The sound tore through the canteen and killed the laughter at once. Tin mugs clattered against the table. Brown’s hand went to his Thompson. Davis was already on his feet.
The Germans had found the bunker.
Chapter Five
“Don’t crowd the entrance,” Davis yelled. “Brown, join Smith up top. Jones, with him. The rest of us stay in reserve.”
Brown charged up the corridor, Thompson tight against his shoulder. Jones followed with the German rifle Mike had given him, his face pale but steady.
Anka sat rigid on the bench, hands folded in her lap. The tea in front of her hadn’t been touched. Her dark eyes watched the soldiers leave her as they raced up the corridor.
“It’s going to be okay!” Mike shouted, grabbing his Lee Enfield and stumbling after Davis.
From deeper in the bunker, Adler shouted from the cell, but his words were lost in the violence of the assault.
Mike followed the rest of the squad, his boots slipping on the damp concrete. The bunker echoed with the Bren’s heavy thumping. Above it came Brown’s Thompson in short, savage bursts, then Jones’s rifle cracking.
“Report,” Davis called up.
At the top of the stairs, Tony was pressed against the entrance wall with the Bren braced across the concrete slit. Brown fired past him through the smoke. Jones crouched lower on the steps, working the bolt of his rifle with careful hands.
“They’ve found us, Sarge,” Brown shouted down. “Full squad, at least.”
A bullet struck the concrete lip of the stairwell and snapped chips into the air. Mike flinched as one struck his cheek.
“More will be on the way,” Davis said.
Outside, German voices rose through the rain. Boots splashed in mud. Someone barked orders. Then a machine gun answered Tony’s Bren, stitching fire across the bunker entrance. Chips jumped from the concrete in puffs of dust. Torn camouflage netting snapped and danced.
Tony fired again. The Bren bucked in his hands. “They’re trying to get round the wire,” he shouted. “Left side.”
Brown fired until the Thompson clicked empty. “Bugger. Last mag.” He tossed it aside and snatched up one of the German rifles stacked near the foot of the stairs. He slapped a stripper clip into it with practised violence.
“Kraut rubbish,” he growled, working the bolt.
Jones fired from beside him. A German screamed outside.
Mike raised his own rifle towards the smoky rectangle of daylight above the stairs, but there was nothing to see. Only muzzle flashes and gun smoke.
“Taylor,” Davis said.
Mike turned.
“Go to the barracks. Get the explosives.”
Mike stared at him.
Davis’s eyes did not move from the stairs. “Move.”
Mike ran.
He raced back through the corridor, away from the gunfire and into the slaughterhouse dark of the bunker. He passed the canteen door and saw Anka still sitting on the bench, watching him with those dark, still eyes.
The barracks stank worse than before. The dead Germans lay where the squad had left them, dragged into piles beside the bunks. A bare foot stuck out into the aisle. Mike stepped over it and nearly fell.
He found the crates near the bottom shelf of the weapons locker, squat wooden boxes labelled Sprengstoff in black paint.
Explosives.
Mike hooked both arms around it and lifted. He hoisted the heavy weight onto his shoulder and staggered towards Davis.
By the time he reached the stairwell, his throat tasted of blood.
Brown was down the stairs, teeth bared, one hand clamped over his thigh. Blood poured between his fingers and ran black down his trouser leg.
“I’m fine, Sarge,” Brown’s voice shook with rage. “It’s a bloody chicken scratch. Bind it up and let me back there.”
Davis took the crate from Mike and set it down by the lower steps. “Williams, here!”
Williams appeared from the radio room with a screwdriver still in one hand. His face changed when he saw the crate.
“Oh, hell.”
“Help me rig the charges.”
Williams looked at the stairwell, then at the entrance above it. Smoke thickened in the upper passage. The Bren fired again, shorter this time.
“Are you sure, Sarge?” Williams worked quickly, laying out the charges.
Davis was reeling out the detonation cord. “Do it!”
Tony shouted something Mike could not make out. A German grenade bounced off the entrance wall and dropped outside. It exploded in the mud with a flat, vicious thump that filled the stairwell with smoke and grit.
Davis looked at Brown’s bleeding leg. Then at the empty Thompson. Then at Mike.
For the first time since Mike had met him, the sergeant looked old.
Davis knelt beside the crate and pulled out a wrapped charge. “New plan, Corporal. We’re going to have ourselves an extended stay.”
Brown stared at him. “Don’t do it, Sarge. Better to die fighting than be stuck in a tomb with dead Nazis.”
“We can’t warn the army if we are dead, Corporal.”
Williams crouched beside the stairwell and began working fast. His hands moved across the charges, fuse, and detonators.
“Taylor,” Davis said. “Remaining boxes.”
Mike ran again.
This time the bunker seemed longer, as his aching arms pumped.
In the barracks, Mike dragged the second crate free and carried it against his chest. His legs burned as he carried it towards the sound of combat.
Behind him, somewhere above and ahead, the German machine gun hammered.
When he returned, smoke had crept halfway down the stairs. Brown sat against the wall while Davis bound his thigh with a field dressing pulled tight enough to make him hiss. Williams had placed charges along the lower stair supports and around a cracked concrete seam near the ceiling.
“Don’t be shy with your ammo, boys,” Davis shouted up the stairs. “This is it.”
Tony’s Bren answered in short bursts.
Brown looked at Mike as he set the second crate down. His face was grey.
“Don’t stand there gawping. Third box.”
Mike nodded and ran.
As he reached the weapons locker, someone shouted from the stairwell.
“Smoke!”
Another voice, Tony’s this time. “They’re coming in!”
Grenades exploded in rapid succession. Mike grabbed the final crate, heaved it up, and staggered into the corridor.
As he staggered towards the squad, he saw Smith and Jones run down the stairway towards him. Mike saw Davis hold up the detonator. Davis looked into Mike’s eyes, then brought his hand down on the plunger.
The explosion smashed the bunker apart.
The corridor bucked beneath Mike. Heat flashed over his face. Choking grey dust blanketed everything, coating their eyelashes and filling their throats. For a while, nobody moved. Mike stood over the crate of explosives. His ears emitted a high, ceaseless whine. His teeth ached from the shockwave. Every breath tasted of pulverised concrete.
Davis tapped his arm, pointed at the crate, then motioned for him to put it down.
Mike’s mouth was full of grit.
Dust filled the corridor, turning the surviving bulbs into a dim, amber smudge. Men staggered through it. Jones crawled on his knees. Williams coughed into his sleeve. Tony stood motionless in the middle of the passage, swaying as he stared towards where the stairwell had been.
There was only rubble.
Concrete blocks, twisted steel, broken sandbags, shattered timber, and grey dust filled the passage from floor to ceiling.
Mike’s hearing slowly returned through the ringing.
Davis straightened slowly.
No one spoke.
Mike looked at Brown and tried to smile. “Corporal?” His own voice sounded far away and wrong. “Do you need the Siegfried Line?”
Brown stared at him, then pushed past. “Not now, kid.”
From the cell, Adler began screaming again.
They were trapped.
Chapter Six
Mike stood over the crate of explosives. His ears rang. His teeth hurt. His mouth was full of grit. Every breath felt like he was swallowing glass.
The stairwell was gone.
Where daylight had been, there was only rubble. Concrete blocks, twisted steel, snapped timber, torn sandbags, and pulverised earth filled the passage from floor to ceiling. Dust seeped from the cracks. Pebbles clicked and tumbled down the face of the obstruction.
Somewhere behind them, Adler was weeping.
He’s lost his mind.
Davis wiped dust from his face with the back of one hand. Blood ran from a cut above his eyebrow and vanished into the grey powder on his cheek. “Roll call.”
No one answered at first.
Davis barked it properly this time. “Roll call!”
“Brown.” The corporal sat with his back against the wall, one leg stretched out before him. The field dressing around his thigh was already dark.
“Jones.” Jones was on his knees near the opposite wall, one hand braced against the concrete.
“Williams.” Williams bent double, spitting grey phlegm onto the floor, then straightened with a grimace.
“Smith.” Tony’s voice quavered.
Mike looked at him.
Tony stood in the middle of the corridor with the Bren hanging loose in his hands. His eyes were fixed on the rubble where the stairwell had been. His chest rose and fell quickly.
“Smith?” Davis said again.
Tony blinked. “Here, Sergeant.” His voice was stronger.
“Taylor?”
Mike realised he had not spoken. “Here. Sorry, Sarge.”
Davis nodded once. “Don’t be sorry. Anyone badly hit?”
Brown gave a sharp laugh. “No.”
“Anyone besides the corporal?” Davis crouched beside Brown. “Let me see.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Davis glared at him. “Don’t be a fool. You have a hole in your leg.”
“Yes, but best not make a fuss. Eh, Sarge?”
Davis peeled back the edge of the dressing. Brown hissed and slapped a hand against the wall. Fresh blood welled beneath the bandage.
Jones crossed the corridor, pulling the medical pouch from his webbing.
“Good man.” Davis took it and searched through the contents. “Taylor, hold his leg still.”
Mike knelt beside Brown.
Brown looked at him. “I really don’t think the child can hold down my leg.”
“Do you want my belt to bite down on?” Davis waited.
“Not a chance. I’m happy as a pig in mud, Sarge.”
“Taylor, are you ready?”
“Yes, Sarge.” Mike gripped Brown’s knee and ankle while Davis packed the wound. Brown’s jaw bunched. Sweat broke through the dust on his forehead. He breathed hard through his nose, grunting as Davis worked, refusing to cry out.
Davis tightened the dressing. Brown thumped the back of his head lightly against the concrete, then exhaled through his teeth.
“Can you stand?” Davis asked.
“Of course I can stand.” Brown glared at him, then tried to push himself up. His injured leg trembled before it took his weight. For a moment, he managed it. Then the colour drained from his face and he sat down hard. “Bugger.”
“That’s it, Corporal. It’s light duties for you,” Davis said.
Tony made a sound in his throat.
Mike looked round.
Tony had moved closer to the rubble. He had put one hand on the concrete blocks. When the voices died down, they heard the faint sound of tools, and beneath it the harsh, guttural sound of German voices.
Williams moved beside him and swept his torch across the collapse. The beam caught drifting dust and vanished into cracks no wider than Mike’s fingers.
Brown closed his eyes. “Well, at least we can die fighting.”
“It’ll take them time to get through all that.” Davis gave Brown a stern look, then turned to Smith. “Air?”
Tony flinched at the word. He sat with his arms around his knees.
“Smith!”
Tony forced himself to breathe through his nose. He rose stiffly, moving away from the rubble, down the corridor towards the canteen. He stopped beneath a small metal grille set high in the wall. He licked a finger, spat out the dust, then held it up to the grille. A relieved smile crossed his face. “Fresh air coming through there.”
Davis nodded. “Good. We have air and we have power. Jones, get a brew going.”
“Yes, Sarge.”
“We have power for now.” Williams shook his head. “But if the generator’s outside, it’s a matter of time until Jerry takes it away.”
“That’s a problem for later,” Davis said. “Get on the wireless.”
Mike passed the canteen. Anka still sat on the bench where Davis had ordered her to sit. Dust had settled on her hair and shoulders. The tea in front of her was covered with a grimy film of it. She was still sitting impassively.
Until Brown was helped by Davis into the room. Then her eyes tracked the wounded soldier.
No.
Not Brown. She was looking at the soldier’s leg.
They had settled down with black tea when Davis called from the radio room. “Taylor.”
The rest of the squad left Brown behind and went to see what news the sergeant had from the radio room.
Jones hesitated. Brown waved him off. “Go on. I can watch one little girl.”
Williams was already bent over the German wireless set. He had the panels open and the insides exposed. Copper wire, glass valves, cracked insulation, and blackened metal filled the belly of the machine. Their own broken wireless lay beside it, stripped half to pieces.
At some point, the operator’s body had been dragged to the barracks.
Davis stood behind him. “Can it send?”
“Two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Sarge.” Williams twisted two wires together and tightened a screw with his screwdriver.
Jones and Smith stood outside, watching the corridor.
Williams replaced a valve, slapped the casing once, then turned a dial.
The wireless crackled.
Everyone went still.
Static filled the room.
Williams adjusted another knob. The static sharpened, rose, broke apart, then steadied into a rough hiss.
A grin twitched at the corner of his mouth. “There you are.”
Davis stepped closer. “Send the warning.”
Williams lifted the microphone. “This is Able Three to any British airborne unit receiving. German armour moving on your flank. Repeat, German armour moving on your flank. Enemy strength unknown. Immediate danger of encirclement. Do you read?”
Static.
Williams waited.
Nothing.
He tried again.
“This is Able Three to any British airborne unit receiving. German armour moving on your flank. Enemy armour moving through the woods east of our position. Do you read?”
Static hissed back at them.
Williams adjusted the frequency. The set crackled, spat, and whined.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, you ugly German bastard.”
He tried again. Nothing answered.
Davis stared at the wireless. “Keep trying.”
Williams changed the frequency. He checked the valves, then traced the cable from the back of the set to the wall. He opened another panel and followed the line into a conduit that vanished up through the concrete.
Then he stopped, his shoulders sinking.
Davis saw it. “Williams.”
“I’m sorry, Sarge.” Williams kept looking at the conduit. “The radio works, but the antenna doesn’t. Signal can’t get out.”
Davis said nothing.
“The mast line’s dead,” Williams said. “More likely Jerry cut it outside. Signal can’t get past the concrete.”
Davis looked at the maps pinned beside the wireless set. For a moment, his face emptied. “Then the 1st British Airborne will be overrun.”
As if answering him, the lights went out.
Darkness swallowed the room, and the wireless hiss died.
“Jerry found the generator, then,” Smith muttered.
For a few seconds, the dark was absolute.
Then Williams’s torch snapped on.
The beam played across the radio room, catching Davis’s bloodied brow.
“Nobody panic.” Davis took the torch from Williams and shone it into the corridor. “One torch at a time. We need to preserve the batteries.”
Before anyone could reply, Brown roared from the canteen.
The sound immediately cut off.
Chapter Seven
As they raced back to the canteen, Adler was screaming in German from his cell.
The room was pitch black.
Davis’s torch cut across the benches, the tables, the cold mugs of tea, and stopped on the empty place where Brown had been slumped.
Anka was weeping somewhere in the dark.
“Spread out,” Davis said.
Weapons raised, the squad waited as Davis swept the room. Then the beam found Brown.
He lay in the corner with both hands clamped around his throat. Blood pulsed between his fingers and ran in thick, dark lines down his wrists. His rifle lay across his lap, unfired. His eyes found Davis, wild and pleading.
For one terrible second, Mike thought Brown was trying to speak.
Davis dropped beside him and pressed both hands over the wound. “Stay with me, Corporal. Don’t let me down now.”
Brown’s lips moved beneath the blood. Mike thought he saw the shape of a word.
Sarge.
Davis pressed harder. “That’s an order, Brown.”
Brown looked at him for one more second. Then his eyes emptied and his body sagged beneath Davis’s hands.
“No.” Davis staggered back. He roared with rage, turning to his squad. “Sod the batteries, torches on.”
Beams clicked on around the room.
Davis’s torch flashed back to Anka. She sat curled in the far corner, arms wrapped around her knees. Blood marked her mouth and chin. Tears ran through it in thin pink tracks. “You! What happened?”
“Sarge, she can’t—” Mike started.
She looked up, eyes puffy with tears. “I didn’t want to hurt him. He was nice to me.”
Mike froze.
That’s not her voice.
Her European accent had gone. She sounded as if she had been born in South London.
Davis heard it too. He drew his pistol. “You’ve been able to speak English all this time?” He pressed the barrel to her forehead.
The corporal was from South London.
She looked forlornly at him, ignoring the presence of the gun.
Jones stepped between them and closed his hand around the barrel. His palm trembled against the metal. “She’s just a girl, Sarge.”
“Move.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll shoot through it.” Davis’s eyes didn’t leave Anka. “Tell me how he died. Now.”
Anka sniffed. “I warned you not to let me out.”
“In bloody German!”
“Dutch. I didn’t know English then.”
Davis shoved Jones aside with his shoulder. “No more games.”
“I haven’t been human for a very long time.” Anka curled up, arms around her knees. “I never wanted to hurt people.”
Mike stepped forward and put a hand against Davis’s chest. “Sarge, please.”
Davis did not look at him.
Mike’s voice shook, but he forced the words out. “You said we weren’t leaving a child in a Nazi cell. You said that. It was the right thing to do.”
“He didn’t tear out his own throat, did he?”
“No, but do you really think a little girl could?” Mike asked.
The pistol remained against Anka’s forehead.
Mike did not move his hand.
Davis shuddered as he breathed hard through his nose. Mike felt it through his palm. “The corporal is dead, boy.”
The girl sadly shook her head. “He isn’t dead.”
Davis lowered the pistol, but didn’t holster it. “No.” His composure returned, cold and brittle. “No, I’m not having this.”
“Sarge...” Mike said.
Davis took a deep breath. “Something else is down here. Close up, we clear the bunker again, something must have—”
Smith made a small, startled sound.
Then came the wet sound of flesh tearing.
Torchlight swung across the room.
Brown’s hands gripped Smith’s massive shoulders. Brown’s mouth was buried in the side of his neck, drinking hard while Smith beat at the corporal with both fists.
The corporal’s ruined throat was completely healed.
Chapter Eight
Smith was still on his feet somehow, both hands locked around Brown’s shoulders. He tried to push Brown away, but even his great hands could not move him. His face turned grey, his mouth opened and closed, trying to form words. Then Brown wrenched his head aside and drank harder. He drank until Smith’s fists stopped beating against his back.
Mike stared in horror, fumbling to raise his rifle and hold his torch at the same time.
“Corporal, stand down!” Davis’s pistol whipped free of his holster, and he aimed it at his former second in command.
“Jesus preserve us.” As the rest of the squad raised their weapons, Jones pulled his crucifix from around his neck and held it in front of him, chanting with a wavering voice. “St Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection—”
Brown saw the crucifix and stopped. For one heartbeat, hope entered Jones’s face, a new strength entering his voice.
“Still praying, Bob?” Brown grinned, his blood filled mouth dripping.
Jones held the crucifix higher.
Brown hurled Smith’s corpse at Davis, flattening him to the ground. He disappeared from the torchlight before the sound of rending flesh drew Mike’s torch to Jones. Brown had torn his head clear from Jone’s body and was drinking hungrily from the stump of his neck. The crucifix lay on the floor beside his open hand, its chain snapped.
Two bullets thudded into his forehead from Davis’s pistol.
The holes spat them out, the wounds closing in front of their eyes.
Brown turned to growl at Davis. He tossed Jones’s body to one side. Beams of torchlight whipped wildly across the ceiling and walls as the room erupted with gunfire.
Seven.
Mike aimed centre mass, not trusting his accuracy as tears obscured his view.
Six.
The .303 round thudded into Brown. Bullets from Williams and Davis joined in the attack.
Five, Four.
Brown staggered back, fury blazing in his eyes.
Three.
Mike stepped forward.
Two. One.
Brown locked eyes with Mike and bunched his muscles to leap.
“We all die together, then!” Brown paused when he saw Williams, who was holding a pair of grenades in his hands. “Or do you want to see if you can heal from these?”
“Let’s make it an even four.” Davis pulled out a pair of grenades from his webbing. “No one walks out.” His face was stone. “I’d rather die by my own hands than yours, old friend.”
Mike watched, his breath caught as his torch went from person to person.
Brown sprang over the nearest table and vanished through the canteen door, leaving Smith and Jones dead behind him. Mike’s torch caught him for one last instant. The image of his blood-blackened mouth, bright eyes, and bloody grin lingered.
Then he was gone.
Mike was still staring at the doorway when the sound of a pistol firing caused him to spin.
Davis had his gun pointed directly at her face.
In the chaos, no one had seen her move. Smith’s head had been torn free. Anka sat beside his body with it cradled in her lap. The bullet had hit her temple dead centre. She continued to sit quietly stroking the hair on Smith’s head, watching the soldiers as the wound healed.
“Sarge, if she’s like the corporal, that won’t hurt her.” Williams laid his hand over Davis’s pistol. “I think we need some answers.”
Davis was glaring at Anka, hate in his eyes.
From the direction of the cell, Adler screamed.
“Sarge! He could return any minute,” Williams continued.
Davis was shaking with rage. “Put down Smith’s head, now!”
Anka put it down next to her. “You have to remove the heads.” She tried to place it upright, but it rolled off the bench onto the floor. “Otherwise, we come back.”
“What?” Davis was visibly trying to regain control. “What do you mean, come back?”
“Our teeth make monsters.” She looked down at Smith’s head. “He didn’t finish this one.”
“So, if I removed your head, you’d die?” Davis’s voice went flat.
Anka nodded. “Yes.”
“Sarge.” Mike stepped between them before he could think better of it. Davis glared at him.
Mike’s legs weakened, but he did not move until Williams touched his arm and pulled him back.
“Come on, son,” Williams muttered.
“Bayonets out,” Davis ordered.
When nobody moved, he pointed at the doorway. “I gave you both an order. Now, bayonets out!”
Mike continued watching him, but numbly dropped his rifle and pulled out his bayonet.
“You can’t kill him,” Anka said.
“You said we just had to remove his head!” Davis snapped.
Anka nodded. “Yes. But I don’t think you can.”
“Then we’ll die as British soldiers. Not Nazi monsters.” Davis pulled out his bayonet. “And you’ll die before us, for what you did to my men.”
Anka extended her neck, tilting her head to one side.
“Unless.” Davis paused. He looked at her.
“You can help us stop him.”
Chapter Nine
“Sarge?” Williams’s voice sounded from behind the kitchen counter. He raised a cleaver. “Might work a bit better than a bayonet.”
Davis accepted the cleaver with a grim expression. “There’s a fire axe in the hallway. I’ll take point. Retrieve it when you can. Mike, hold the rear, here.” He tossed him his revolver.
“Yes, Sarge.” He looked down at the Enfield No. 2, his thumb brushing across the wooden grip, then the cold steel.
A tiny cold hand slipped into his spare hand. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”
He looked down to see Anka. “Stay behind with me.”
“No.” She gave him a wan smile. “I have to go first.”
Davis watched quietly. He didn’t comment.
“He’ll kill you,” Mike whispered.
“I don’t think he will.” Anka let go of Mike’s hand. “He’s very young.” She skipped to the corridor entrance.
Mike held the revolver ready. It made him feel better. He broke it open, counted six rounds, then snapped it shut.
“Ready, Private?”
Mike jerked. Looking up, he saw Davis watching him. His eyes were cold and calculating. “Yes, Sarge.” He raised the revolver. “Ready when you are.”
Davis let Anka lead them into the corridor.
They heard wet, greedy sounds from the direction of the cells. Mike thought of Adler tied and helpless in the dark.
“Brown! Fall in,” Davis called out, his cleaver outstretched. Behind him, Williams took the fire axe down from the wall.
Brown walked into the corridor. Smirking, he performed a perfect parade ground salute. “Corporal Brown, reporting as requested.” He looked down at the cleaver. “Is that cheap piece of Kraut tin for me, Sarge?”
“Corporal. The correct response is ‘Reporting for duty.’” Davis stopped, the two sides facing off in the corridor.
“Is it?” Brown shrugged. “Do you know what that is yet?” He nodded at Anka.
“I’ve a fair idea.” Davis held the cleaver in a combat stance. “Can’t say I like it much.”
The corridor was too narrow for a clean shot. Davis and Anka were in the way, Williams’s axe glinted in the torchlight, but Mike still held the revolver upright, his grip shaking. His spare hand pointed a torch at Brown.
“We don’t have to fight, Sarge.” Brown’s words lacked conviction. His eyes were looking hungry as he flexed his shoulders. “Come on mate, after all we went through in Africa, after all that bloody business, I’d hate for you to die buried in a hole.”
“It wasn’t you that I served with in Africa. It was a loyal British soldier.” Davis took a step forward.
“Sarge, the radio failed. Your warning never got out. Our boys are walking into an ambush. Because you’re buried down here with me.” Brown cricked his neck. “You know that any moment now, Jerry is going to dig through. I can hear them getting closer and closer.” Brown flexed his fingers. “Turn me loose, Sarge. I’ll butcher the bloody kraut’s before they knew what’s happened. We can still save our brothers.”
Davis was quiet.
“I could make you strong enough to finish the job.” Brown grinned. “What do you say, Sarge? Want to be a hero?”
“Something like that.” Davis licked his lips. “But see, Corporal, you killed my men.”
For a moment, everyone was silent. For one sick second, Mike thought Davis was considering the offer.
Then Davis’s eyes narrowed at Brown. “Now.”
One moment Anka was beside Mike. The next, she blurred forwards, striking Brown with a flat, awful crack. They hit the wall together hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling. Behind them, the wall cracked. Their limbs moved in a blur,
Mike couldn’t keep track of the fight, he registered the impacts more, the bunker shaking as they tore into each other.
Anka hit the wall feet first, crawled across the ceiling for half a second, then dropped back onto Brown.
Davis watched them intently, only his jaw moved, clenching and unclenching. He barely seemed to blink as he hefted the cleaver in his hand.
What do I do?
Mike gnawed on his lip. Trying to keep the torch focused on the battle.
Crump.
Brown’s body crashed onto the floor, his skull cracking on the impact. His hands held Anka’s tiny wrists tight as she slowly pushed her hands closer to his skull, his thick arms forced back by her strength.
Davis strode forwards. His cleaver ready to finish the job.
Anka was suddenly grabbed from behind and hurled down the corridor.
For the briefest moment, Adler was caught in the torchlight. The ropes still hung from one wrist, snapped and dangling. Then he vanished into the dark.
Davis and Williams ran charged towards Brown as his skull knitted together.
Mike was only a second behind them.
Williams brought the axe down, thudding into Brown’s head, the German steel fracturing Brown’s skull.
Davis fell to one knee and hacked at Brown’s neck. The first blow was deep, but it took seven blows to hack through gristle, muscle, bone, and completely sever the head. Panting, he stared down at Brown with something like regret. “At ease, Corporal.” He closed the eye lids on the disembodied head and retrieved Brown’s identity discs. “I’ll make sure your family is looked after.”
Footsteps padded in the dark. Mike raised his revolver with both hands.
Chapter Ten
Anka walked towards them. In the torchlight, her eyes glimmered red.
“Is he…” Williams left the sentence hanging.
“No. I left him alive before because he was the only nice man when they woke me.” She looked down. “Now he sleeps forever.”
Davis kept his cleaver up. “And you? Are you hungry?”
“Always.” Anka looked at them impassively. “I can control the thirst for a while, but eventually, I will feed on you all.”
The soldiers kept their weapons raised as she came closer.
“But I want you to send me to sleep first.” She smiled. “I want to see my family again.”
“What if we locked you up in the cell?” Williams lowered his axe. “I don’t want to kill a little girl.”
Anka shook her head. “No, someone would open the cell eventually and use me to make monsters, like the bad men. You have to remove my head.”
“Is that the only way?” Davis studied her.
“Sunlight also ends us. That’s how my parents died in Hordaland, when the men of the Cross found us. They didn’t want to kill a girl, so they buried me. I don’t know how long for.” A shadow seemed to cross her face. “I don’t want to go out that way.”
Hordaland.
Mike didn’t know the name, but he knew it was not Dutch.
Davis cautiously lowered his cleaver. “You hear the people digging back there? When they come in, they’ll kill us all. Thousands of our brothers are relying on us to get a message to them.” He tried to smile. It came out like a grimace. “Can you help us?”
“I’m already hungry. I barely fed from him.” She looked at Corporal Brown’s body. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t help.”
Williams looked at Mike. “Sarge, if it comes to it, we can’t let the Nazis take us alive.”
Davis went silent, looking at the rubble, listening to the sound of trenching tools.
“We could shoot each other. Last one alive sets off a grenade?” Mike’s voice was stronger than he expected. He heard himself say it, yet felt nothing.
“Sunshine or decapitation,” Davis muttered. “Brown tore through us like shell fire. He could have destroyed the SS regiment outside.”
“Sarge…” Williams looked at him warily. “That’s Brown talking through your mouth.”
“Don’t you dare compare me to Brown! He was robbed of his choice. Listen, it’s sunrise in a few hours.” Davis continued. “We could wait for them to dig through, then we’d have maybe an hour before sunrise? Maybe less, to kill as many Germans as possible before sunlight takes us. Think of the time we would buy for our boys!”
“I’m not becoming a monster.” Mike backed away from Davis.
“And I won’t make any more monsters.” Anka’s face hardened. For the first time, Mike saw age behind her eyes. “That is what the bad men wanted,” she said. “That’s what they always want.”
Davis began to pace. “All of us, or none of us. Anyone left human becomes food. That’s never happening again.”
“I said, ‘No’.” Anka looked up at Davis’s face.
“We have a decision to make. We can die here, by our own hands.” Davis looked at both of them. “Our boys are cut off at Arnhem. German armour is moving on their flank. If we can buy them even an hour, that’s more time for the rest of the army to relieve them.”
Mike looked at Davis and understood, with a cold twist in his stomach, that the sergeant might be right.
Can I die knowing I could have saved my regiment, but chose not to?
“Are you really going to say that you fulfilled your oath, to do your duty to King and Country, by shooting yourself in a hole while your brothers died?” Davis’s voice was quiet and intense as he pulled from his pocket a fistful of identity discs. “Are you telling me that they died for nothing?”
“I won’t do it!” Anka approached Davis. “How do you intend to make me?”
“Trade.”
Chapter Eleven
Anka looked at Davis. “I want your word.”
Davis stood like stone, eyes locked onto her. “You have my word as a soldier of the British Army and as an Englishman.”
“That’s not enough.” She ignored the anger that flashed across his face. She reached into his pocket and pulled out the identity discs he’d managed to recover. Six of them, Evan’s was lost in the trees, looped together on a blood-darkened cord. “Swear on these.”
Davis hesitated.
He looked first at the discs, then at her. Slowly, he placed his hand over them.
“I swear on my honour, on these discs, and on the names of Corporal Brown, Privates Jones, Smith, Evans, Clarke, Reed, and Fletcher.” His voice strengthened with every name. “When we have warned the regiment, we will accept death by sunlight before we spill innocent blood.”
“And you will behead me when I have cursed you?”
David nodded. “I swear, I will grant you a clean death.
A ghost of a smile touched Anka’s face. Then it returned to the impassive expression they’d gotten used to. She took Davis’s hand, and bit into the wrist. It was a small bite, the blood trickled down his arm and she gently covered the wound with his other hand. “Kneel down and hold it tight.”
She repeated the process with Mike and Williams. Then walked behind them. “The bite is not enough, but I’ll make it quick.”
Mike heard a crack. He turned his head to see what had happened, but before he could make sense of it, small hands had gripped his skull. He saw the floor in front of him, the scuffed concrete covered in dust and stained with blood, then the world snapped.
Mike woke some time after. He opened his eyes, to find the colours had bled from the world, leaving the bunker in stark, luminous shades of silver and ash. The sounds were maddening. He could hear the scuff of a boot against a pebble fifty yards away. He could hear the erratic, thumping drumbeats of the Germans’ hearts behind the rubble. He drew a breath, and his mind was flooded with the sour tang of their adrenaline, the grease on their rifles, and beneath it all, the intoxicating, heavy perfume of blood. His gums throbbed, a brutal ache radiating through his jaw as his mouth flooded with saliva.
“You killed us!” Davis was on his feet in a heartbeat.
Mike moved faster than he’d ever moved before, in a blink, he was between Davis and Anka.
“No, I only stopped your hearts,” Anka said. “But, you will kill me. You promised.”
The three newborns turned to look at the buried stairwell, the German’s were still working to clear it.
“I’m so hungry,” Williams muttered. “You should have waited, the German’s haven’t broken through yet.”
“You’ll clear the wreckage faster than they ever could, and you are running out of night.” Anka gently motioned to Mike to move to one side. “Let him go, Taylor, please.” He obliged. “I would like you to use the axe, Davis, please. It has to be you.” She knelt down and extended her neck.
“Are you sure?” Davis took the axe from where Williams had dropped.
Anka turned and snarled. “Don’t break your oath now.”
Davis’s face darkened, without any more words, he raised the axe.
Mike struggled to find the words. “Anka, I just want to say—”
The axe fell, her head rolled to the side and came to rest against the wall. She was still smiling.
Davis stood over her, axe hanging from his hand. He sucked at his teeth. Then dropped the axe.
I’m sorry for what you had to go through.
Mike looked at her head with regret.
Then the pack of soldiers turned as one to the rubble, they could hear the heartbeats of the German’s as they laboured behind it. They fell on the dirt and chunks of cement with nails stronger than steel, hurling it behind them with ungodly strength.
Chapter Twelve
His mouth watered as the gap widened. Torchlight flashed through the dust from outside. A German voice barked something. Another answered.
Mike could smell sweat, leather, cigarette smoke, and the tang of adrenaline on their bodies.
The first sliver of night appeared through the broken entrance as the German tools scraped closer. The constant rain stopped outside, leaving the forest shining black beneath the last stars of the night. Mike could see each bead of water clinging to the torn wire.
A German helmet appeared through the gap.
Davis reached through the opening, seized the man by the throat, and pulled him into the bunker so hard that his skull struck the concrete edge with a wet crack. Mike seized the German’s wrist and bit down before he could stop himself. They drank together while the other Germans cried out.
As he fed, the German voices grew in clarity. He could understand their language far beyond the schoolboy German he’d learned as a child.
“If you bite, take the head.” Williams gripped the helmet and jaw and twisted until the neck came apart before the corpse could rise. “No more monsters.”
“No more monsters,” Mike and Davis echoed.
They tore through the last of the rubble. The Germans had fled to the bunker entrance.
The night air rushed in as Mike sprang after them.
The first German had only begun to raise his rifle when Mike hit him. They went down together in the mud beyond the ruined entrance. Mike heard the man’s heartbeat hammering inches from his face. He smelled the blood under his jaw. The hunger roared up so fiercely that the forest tilted.
Don’t bite. No time to take their heads.
Mike smashed the German’s head against a stone instead. Despite the helmet, the man went limp, his skull fracturing under the impact.
Mike rolled away from him, shaking.
Davis moved with murderous efficiency, breaking necks, tearing rifles from hands, moving on before the bodies fell.
A rifle fired. The bullet punched through Mike’s shoulder with a sharp, distant pop, leaving nothing but a dull itch. He didn’t slow. Instead, he seized the shooter by the face and drove him backwards into the barbed wire, tearing his back into ribbons.
Williams laughed once. Mike felt the same exhilaration as hunger and power flowed through his body, but it was coupled with a deep and unabating shame. He knew he had changed, and not just physically.
He pushed down his worries and threw himself at two Germans near the sandbags. One managed to strike Mike with the butt of a rifle.
Williams caught the weapon, ripped it free, and broke the man’s arm with a twist. He hurled the German into the concrete wall and stepped away from the body, panting.
More Germans waited in the trees. They had come expecting wounded men trapped underground.
Not monsters.
“Push through. We have to get to the armoured column,” Davis ordered. “If even one company is still holding, then we can buy them time.”
They closed around him instinctively, weaving through the trees. The forest opened around them in silver and black. Mike could see everything. Craters, wire, broken branches, boot prints in the mud, steam rising from warm blood. He could smell where soldiers had been and where they had gone, tracking the invisible wake of their sweat and fear through the trees.
A German fired from behind a pine.
Mike heard the trigger before the rifle cracked. He stepped aside, the bullet missing him. He closed the gap in seconds, snapping the man’s neck and rejoining the others. Weapons were an inconvenience for him now. His hands were deadlier than any rifle. Another reminder that he was no longer a soldier.
Davis and Williams crashed through the German line ahead of him. Men shouted. Rifles fired. They broke them apart, cutting and smashing, wading through mud, blood, and shattered bone, driving them back through the trees.
Williams found the machine gun nest first.
The crew tried to swing it towards him. Williams leapt over the barrel, landed on the nearest man, and drove him down into the mud. The second gunner reached for a stick grenade tucked into his belt.
“Williams!” Mike shouted.
Too late. The German pulled the cord.
Williams saw it. He clamped one hand over the German’s wrist and the other around his throat.
Then the stick grenade went off between them. The blast tore the night open.
Mike was thrown backwards against a tree. Splinters rained around him. Smoke rolled low across the mud. His ears rang, but beneath the ringing, he could still hear heartbeats. He looked up. The blast had completely severed Williams’s head and torn his upper chest apart.
“Williams?” Mike pushed himself upright. “Williams!” The words came out correctly, but the grief that should have torn at him never came.
Williams’s torso twitched once in the mud. His head lay several feet from the rest of him, eyes open. Then the body stilled.
Davis stood over him. For a second, the sergeant looked down at what remained of Lance Corporal Williams. His lips peeled back from his teeth.
Then he bent, pulled the identity discs from Williams’s neck, and added them to the others. “We’re not done.”
Mike stared at him. “Sarge.”
“Move, Private.”
German engines growled somewhere beyond the trees.
Davis turned towards the sound.
The armoured column was closer than Mike had realised. He smelled the petrol and engine fumes.
Davis’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Found them.”
They ran.
The forest thinned near a muddy track churned to black soup by wheels and treads. German vehicles stretched along it in the last darkness before dawn. Half-tracks, lorries, armoured cars, and two heavier shapes lumbering down the track, a Panther tank and a squat StuG tank destroyer. They were driving towards the British line ahead of them.
“Our boys can handle the soldiers.” Davis sprang towards the Panther, calling behind him. “Stop the armour. Anything that rifles can’t touch.”
They had almost reached the British lines, but beyond the trees, the eastern sky had begun to pale.
Mike crossed the track in a blur and hit the first vehicle from the side. The machine gunner at the rear turned his head, confused by a sound he would never understand. Mike pulled him from the mount and threw him into the road. The driver opened the door and Mike dropped down to drag him out through the gap.
Davis was on the Panther before the commander saw him. He ripped the hatch wide, dropped a grenade into the dark, and leapt clear.
Mike ran for the nearest lorry. A German saw him coming and raised a pistol. Mike ducked under the shot, seized the man by the tunic, and slammed him against the bonnet. His bones shattered under the impact. Mike could scent his blood, he thirsted for it.
Bullets stitched up his spine as he fell to the ground. He panted as he felt the wounds closing, the bullets popping out one by one as the Germans approached him from behind. Then he sprang over the lorry and ran round the side, eviscerating the two men. As his wounds healed, his hunger tore at him.
Ahead, Davis had reached the StuG. Bullets tore through his coat as he climbed onto the hull. He grabbed the hatch handle and wrenched it open. Someone inside fired up at him. Davis dived down into the opening. The screams inside the tank suddenly cut off.
The Germans were fleeing.
Men ran in every direction. Some of the Germans fired at shadows, some fired at each other. Engines revved in panic. A lorry reversed into a ditch.
Davis stood on top of the StuG, grinning at the victory, his coat riddled with holes. The column had been stopped. The road was blocked by burning steel.
Mike stood shaking, his hands red and his stomach burning with hunger. He caught himself licking his fingers and forced himself to stop.
Beyond the road, past the burning vehicles and the screaming Germans, Mike could hear another battle.
Lee Enfield rifles, Bren guns. Men shouting orders in English, crying for stretcher-bearers. The sounds came thinly through the trees, scattered and desperate. Men holding hedges, ruins, ditches, and shattered houses.
Davis heard it too. For a moment, his grin faded, then he was running towards the British lines.
“Sarge?” Mike ran after him. “The mission is complete!”
He glanced east. The darkness between the trees was thinning. The paling sky made his skin itch.
Dawn.
Davis continued to run.
Mike followed him through the woods as the world around them turned grey. “Sarge! We won. Stop!” But it didn’t look like victory, the corpses of British soldiers littered the area.
The scent of dead blood made him feel lightheaded.
Davis moved ahead of him, fast, with a predatory grace.
A thin line of gold appeared behind the trees.
Smoke curled from the back of Mike’s hand, where the first rays of sunlight lashed his skin.
Mike heard their voices before he reached the bunker.
The bunker had been German once, he saw the bodies of the British who had paid for every inch taking it. Now dead German machine-gunners lay outside the entrance, and British helmets showed behind the firing slit. As he got closer, he saw his brother’s muddy faces, torn uniforms, filthy bandages, and hands blackened.
“Give it a rest, Jack, the matches are damp,” someone muttered in a thick Brummie accent.
“I just want one drag, mate. I’ve earned it,” another replied.
When Davis sprinted into the light, Jack dropped his cigarette, scrambling frantically for the bolt of his Lee Enfield. “Oi! Identify yourselves!” his voice cracked with exhaustion.
Mike heard their hearts inside the bunker, British heartbeats fast and frightened.
Davis opened his mouth to speak as he ran.
One of the paratroopers fired, then they all did.
The first bullet tore through Davis’s cheek. The second struck his throat, robbing him of speech. His eyes narrowed, but the wounds didn’t slow him. He closed the distance as they began to heal.
“No!” Mike screamed as Davis entered the bunker.
Chapter Thirteen
Mike could smell the freshly spilled blood. He heard the heartbeats die one by one. When the final heart stilled, Mike slowed.
His flesh crackled under the sunlight as he hesitated outside the bunker.
His mind screamed at him not to enter.
He stepped inside.
Davis was slumped in one corner with a radio handset in his bloodied hand. “This is Able Three to any British airborne unit receiving. German armour confirmed east of your position. I repeat. German armour confirmed east of your position. Column halted. Infantry scattered. Expect renewed assault.”
He looked up as Mike entered.
Four British soldiers lay around him, heads torn from their shattered necks, rifles still clutched in dead hands. Mike recognised one from training. Another had shared cigarettes with him on watch.
A voice crackled through the handset. “Message received, Able Three. Armour east of our position. Holding line. God help you.”
The handset dropped from Davis’s hand.
Mike was looking at the dead soldiers. “What did you do?”
Davis didn’t answer.
“Sarge, we have to stop.” Mike cautiously stepped towards him.
Davis looked up, rage filling his eyes. “Why did they shoot me? I tried to save them.”
“We aren’t like them any more, Sarge.” He knelt down. “I’m sorry. I wish we were human, but we aren’t.”
“I’m a British soldier, Private. I swore an oath to defend Crown and country, and I meant every bloody word of it.” Davis rose, flexing his hands. “Jerry massacred our boys. We have to avenge them.”
Mike held up his hands. “I’m not going to fight you, Sarge.”
“You can’t fight me.” anHe paced the back wall in the shade. “We wait until night. Then we attack. We could fight our way to Berlin. Kill Hitler, maybe. End the war.”
“Sarge, we swore another oath.”
Davis spun, his finger an inch from Mike’s face. “Don’t you dare lecture me on duty. I was at Dunkirk. Brown was by my side from Libya onwards.” He snarled at Mike. “I’m doing this to honour our fallen comrades.”
No, you aren’t. This is guilt.
“If we move away from the British lines, then this won’t happen again.” Davis glanced at the dead paratroopers for a fraction of a second before turning away.
“You sent the warning, Sarge. We completed the mission.”
Davis snorted. “The war is still raging, son.”
“Not for us, Sarge, we swore on our squad.” Mike reached down and took one of the dead paratrooper’s discs. “You can’t help the dead, but you can help me.”
“Help you?” Davis looked confused.
“I don’t think I’m strong enough to walk out into the sun.” Mike looked down. “I can’t complete the mission.”
Davis regarded him for a long while. His jaw worked, then he exhaled. For a moment, the unnatural strength seemed to leave him and his face looked old. Very old. He reached over and took the identity discs from Mike. He moved from body to body, taking the murdered paratroopers’ discs. Then he placed them in his pocket with the rest of the squad’s.
His shoulders slumped. He patted the pocket containing the identity discs, then straightened, his eyes narrowed, and once again he found his strength. “Attention.”
Mike snapped to attention.
“Look at the state of you, Private,” Davis barked, his old mannerisms returning. “I’ve never seen such a sorry excuse for a soldier.”
“Yes, Sarge. Sorry, Sarge.”
For the briefest of moments, Davis smiled at Mike. Then he turned to face the bunker entrance, brilliant sunlight streaming through it. “Squad will assemble for morning inspection. Move.”
Mike pivoted. They removed their helmets and pulled on their red berets. A blood red tear ran down his cheek.
Then the last of the section marched into the sun.
THE END
Tales of the Macabre
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