by Thomas Wood
My pressure on the trigger was such that I barely believed that a round hadn’t exploded from the end of the barrel yet. The sweat that rolled off my fingers in droves began to help my finger slide around slowly, to the point where I made a concerted effort to keep it exactly where it was meant to be.
There can’t have been too much further to go before the gun erupted now, and I began to close both my eyes as I prayed for the explosion of pain that would immediately succeed the noise of the bang.
I squeezed and squeezed, forcing my quaking finger further and further into the spring of the trigger, the—
“Wait! Alf! Stop!”
For a brief moment, I was almost relieved that he had called out to me, as I didn’t think that it was within me to try and execute this man after I had committed so many murders. This had been the first one that hadn’t been on instinct, I had been thinking this one through.
I locked eyes with Red for the first time since he had killed my one and only loyal friend, his eyes refusing to offer up any type of apology or remorse for what he had done.
Even from there, his loud Geordie tones could be heard as he called out to the officer who was still cowering behind him. I wondered at which point he would resume command of the situation and begin to behave like a real officer should.
“Let me talk to him. He won’t shoot me. Trust me.”
The officer gave a curt nod of his head, which resulted in many of the relaxed soldiers around him becoming even more so, hands so far away from triggers that, if I had had enough ammunition, I thought I would have been able to shoot them all before they even managed to fire one round back in return.
Simply stepping over the corpse of Jameson, he started to crunch his way over the gravel of the railway, each pace being carefully calculated and thought through. I stared at him as he came closer to me, and I noticed how his tall, wiry frame that I had become so accustomed to a year ago, was stockier now, he had filled out greatly. I supposed that the rations the Germans gave to their informers was far better than that of the British Army.
He walked with a greater confidence than he ever had done before, which I supposed had far more to do with the firepower that he had stockpiled behind him than any other kind of character defining development that the Germans had empowered him with.
The crunch of the gravel increased loudly as it started to bounce off the walls of the factory and warehouse, the sound of my breathing being the only other thing to compete with its volume.
He only had about one hundred and fifty yards to go, and now I could make out his eyes were wild and fired up, more so than they ever had been before. This sort of thing was what he had come to live for.
My hatred for Joseph waned dramatically, as if a dam had burst, my feelings for Red suddenly reaching maliciously dangerous levels all of a sudden, so much so that I began to think whether I should take my chances and bury a few rounds in him instead.
The Germans could keep Joseph, and maybe then I would still be able to take that deal that he had offered me, and one day run off to Switzerland to enjoy a peaceful life in the mountains. If I was to dispatch of Red, then maybe I could take his place and that I would take a special place in Joseph’s pecking order after such a display of loyalty.
But then I started to confuse myself, over whether I was trying to murder him for my own personal gains, or if it was out of a disappointment that he had let me down. He had betrayed me, and he had killed my only confidante in the process.
It was Jimmy and Joseph who had been the ones to instigate this whole circus though and, in the absence of Jimmy, Joseph was my most legitimate target, he was the one that I should be wanting to dispatch of no matter what. The tumultuous tug of war that raged around in my mind was not over who posed the biggest threat right now, for my fate was already sealed, but who presented the biggest silhouette of evil as we all stood there in limbo.
Joseph had lied, cheated and murdered to get to where he was now. But then again, so had Red. Further still, so had I. Maybe I was the truly deserving recipient of my own bullet. I knew that it would solve a whole heap of pain if I was to simply put an end to it all now. Every man here would be able to go home and continue on with his life, without any more bloodshed or senseless killing.
But that wasn’t what was right. I had done nothing wrong. I, now that Jameson was gone, was the most innocent party in all of this. If anyone deserved to live here, it was me.
As he continued to slowly make his way towards me, Joseph still kneeling at my feet, I couldn’t quite work out who was the bigger evil, who was the one that would go on to make the world a worse place than it already was?
I decided that I didn’t have too much choice in the matter, I was simply going to have to wait and see how this one was going to pan out. At the end of the day, I still had my pistol, so whoever it was that posed an immediate threat to my life, would likely be the one that I justified as the bigger evil.
My eyes were all of a sudden drawn away from the pistol that was in Red’s right hand, as his arm gently swung, marching his way towards me. I abruptly found myself utterly compelled to look straight into his eyes, with a deeper, more searching intensity than I had ever felt necessary before.
They continued to glow, the grey-blue that he had always had, and with every second that I stared into them, I felt the soldiers behind him disappear one by one, like it was just me and him left in the vicinity. I could sense him talking to me, in his long drawn out tone of the north west, that had always had a calming effect on me, so much so that I always tried to speak to him whenever I had felt nervous.
Everything came flooding back to me, the feelings of companionship and comradeship, the laughs that he had always drawn out of me, and all of those around him, and the eternal loyalty that he had always willingly bestowed upon me.
He had me transfixed, he was a master of his trade, in manipulating someone, making them forget that not thirty seconds ago he had murdered another of my loyal friends. Everything had been forgotten.
In that moment, it was almost like we had never been apart. We had never been separated by the mortar that had fallen on his position, we hadn’t spent months apart simply trying to survive, he had been next to me the whole time. I felt my conscious mind begin to row with my unconscious, telling every fibre of my being that I should not trust this man, that he had been corrupted and yet, I found myself wanting to run to him, to embrace one another and to have a catch up on all the things that we had missed in one another’s lives.
His feet continued to crack and snap on the gravel, and I could almost begin to hear his annoying humming, as it played out across my mind, reminiscing of the times when he would sing his favourite songs as we charged into battle. The last time I had heard him hum was in this very country, in 1940, when we had discovered a convoy of German armour and were on our way to report back to the regiment. He had done it habitually, trying to relieve some of the cut throat tension that hung in the stagnant air of our tank.
As we stared at one another, I felt like he had been next to me the whole time. He had been alongside me as I travelled through France, he had been there on that ship away from Gibraltar, he was somewhere in the darkness of the airfield as we had broken in. He had always been alongside me. Red had even been the feature of my dreams, the ones that he seemed to haunt, but at the same time, the ones that I had enjoyed. He had always been loyal to me.
Somehow, despite the lack of contact and lack of knowledge that I had had of his existence, we had still maintained the connection, still harboured the almost telepathic bonding that we had displayed a year ago.
It was in his eyes that I first began to detect a change, like he was trying to talk to me once again, to comfort me and soothe me, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what he was trying to say.
His eyes continuously flicked between me, and something over to my right, and I began to brace myself for the blunt force of a rifle butt to the skull, or maybe even the sudden rel
ief of a murderous bullet.
But then, as he drew closer, his eyes called me in, screamed at me, telling me something far more urgent than to beware of the impending pain. Eventually, I risked edging my head round to try and see what it was he was looking at, expecting to see the black abyss of a rifle barrel pointed square in my face, or maybe even Hitler himself, his thumb down like a Roman general as he witnessed my execution for his own enjoyment.
There was nothing there. There was no one there, and I couldn’t see any kind of signs of movement to acknowledge what Red had been looking at.
I looked at him again. He was maybe only thirty yards from me now, well within effective firing range, his eyes agitatedly glancing between me and the corner of the factory building.
It was then that it clicked. He was not signalling to someone else, he was signalling to me. He was talking to me, in those smooth tones that had always done so much to set me at ease.
After ten or so more crunches over the gravel, his eyes seemed to sigh an almighty expression of relief, as if he was now rebuking me for having been so slow on the uptake in the first place.
I wondered if he was simply sending me into the jaws of death, but at that moment in time, I didn’t have any other choice but to put all of my faith in him.
30
I tried to give Red the slightest of nods, so that he knew that I was aware of what he was thinking, and that, however stupid I thought the whole plot to be, I was going to do as he was telling me. He didn’t move his head in response, and I thought for a moment what a fool I had been, as I realised the possibility that I had gravely misread his signals, and he wasn’t the friend that I had assumed him to be.
He continued to march his way over to me ceremonially and I realised that it was an MP40 submachine gun that he had slung across his back, as the barrel of it was poking just over his left shoulder.
I supposed that I had no one else to blame but myself as I realised that I had messed up, a mistake that would no doubt have fatal consequences. But it took me by surprise all the same, I had hoped that in the intervening period between shooting Jameson and reaching me, Red would have had a road to Damascus experience, coming to his senses and becoming my friend once again.
What he started to do however couldn’t have been further away from that dream. The pistol that was drooping down by his right-hand side was suddenly called into action, as he pulled both hands up to support it, ready to pepper me with bullets at any second. He kept both his eyes open, locked onto me as if it was just me and him, exactly how we had been taught to shoot when we had done our basic training.
“Step away from him Alf. Hand him over. The offer will still stand. You can still get out of this alive!”
In my heart of hearts, I knew that I shouldn’t have expected him to make such a change in such a short space of time, but still it felt like a blunt, jagged dagger being pierced through my heart as he shouted the words at me.
“Nothing silly, Alf. You still have a chance here.”
I had no chance. And now, I was out of options. I went to take a step forward, to blow Joseph’s brains out and put an end to this, once and for all.
“Don’t! Stay where you are, Captain Lewis.”
I looked up at him for a moment, taken aback slightly by the fact that he had called me by my full title, something which I was sure he had never done before. I had always been ‘Alf’ to him, or ‘Sir’ when in front of anyone who wasn’t my tank crew, but never before by my full title.
I looked into his eyes, just as his pistol was called into action, three blindingly white flashes obscuring his face for a moment, making me flinch and blink. The flashes were accompanied later by three ear-popping bangs, as if they had completely forgotten to erupt along with the flashes, only remembering to do it half a second later.
Waiting for the eruption of pain as my brain registered that three bullets had penetrated the defences of my skin, I began to feel wholeheartedly disappointed that it was going to end like this. As soon as I had stepped out into that courtyard, I had known that this would have been my fate, but I nonetheless felt hard done by that I had not been able to come up with an alternative escape route, I had failed in my own attempts to keep myself alive.
It was a shame, especially as I had always wanted to have gone to Switzerland. But, alas, it was not meant to be.
I felt like I was in a state of flux, like I was in a purgatory on earth. I was not alive, but likewise I was not yet dead either. I was simply waiting to die. I could see nothing now, could hear no sounds, not even my own breathing and strangely, I could not taste the blood in my mouth that I had expected when death inevitably came.
Gradually, expecting to see a totally blank white canvas, I opened my eyes, hoping that I would never have to witness anything quite as bloody and brutal as my own murderous bullets making their way towards me ever again.
I felt sick as I began to hear my own breathing once again, disappointed that I wasn’t already in the afterlife. Red was glaring back at me, pistol still raised as if he hadn’t even fired a shot. For a moment I thought that maybe he hadn’t, and what I had seen was the wishful imaginings of my mind, resigned to die, I just wanted it to happen.
Curiously, I began to look around, to see if anyone else had reacted to the bullets that I had thought I had seen racing towards me. Looking around, no one had seemed to have moved an inch, none of them displaying any signs of even having flinched.
The soldiers all still stood there, their hands still metres away from their triggers, just watching the back of Red’s head marching towards us, the officer still stood at the far end of the track, cigarette hanging nervously from his fingers and Jameson was still exactly where he had fallen just seconds before.
Slowly, I began to regain the rest of my senses and, to my surprise and bewilderment, I felt something beginning to run down my face, like a spider was gently tickling his way over the pores of my skin, trying to work out how he had ended up here. Reaching up to touch it, I realised that whatever it was was burning hot, as if it had only just been removed from a roaring stove.
Inspecting the soft, warm substance that met my touch, I realised that it was a fluorescent pink, almost as if it was completely inhuman, I had never seen something so naturally bright in all my life. The more I held it, the more I became convinced that it was part of my own body, a bit of brain matter perhaps, before I gave in and sunk to the floor. But I couldn’t comprehend why I was still not feeling any pain whatsoever, despite the fact that I was picking bits of myself off my own face.
As I brought my hand down lower to inspect it, I realised why. It hadn’t been my brain matter; in fact it hadn’t been any matter of my own whatsoever.
The three bullets had been aimed at a slightly lower trajectory, hitting something else before they had been able to get me.
Red had buried three rounds straight into the torso of Joseph Baudouin, and I made sense of the situation just in time to watch him begin to swing, like a hinged door, towards the ground, where the impact of the gravel instantly grazed his forehead.
I noticed that the three rounds had exited out of the back of Joseph’s flesh, leaving much larger holes in his back than there would be at the front. All three rounds must have pinged around inside him, taking bits of bone and rupturing organs to the best of their ability, as all of them had exited his back at different points. One out of his left shoulder blade, one just below where his left ribs must have been and one on his lower right side, where a huge void had opened up and blood was already surging from it.
Blood began to pour from his body with a more concerted effort, presumably as his heart tried to keep up with the adrenaline that was pumping around him, trying to get his blood to all the right places but, ironically just speeding up his death.
He was haemorrhaging significantly, but Joseph Baudouin was still alive. I could make out his short, sharp breaths as he tried desperately to fight for his life and, for a moment, I felt almost bad for his si
tuation. He wouldn’t really have known what was going on, his mind totally confused at the sudden loss of blood from his body, all his thoughts fading into nothing as every ounce of his energy became focused on keeping him alive.
I felt like the right thing to do now would be to put a bullet in his brain for him, to put him out of his misery, but I couldn’t get my hands to cooperate in the way that I wanted them to, I was rooted to the spot.
Still, no one moved, the only one that seemed capable of continuing to function normally was Red, who was still marching towards me, pistol smoking ever so slightly after ejecting his rounds. He can’t have been more than a few yards from me now, and I felt like throwing myself into his arms and sobbing uncontrollably at the situation. But, in amongst everything, I still hated him for being the one who got Joseph in the end, I had always wanted it to have been me to have done the honours of putting him to sleep.
As the sound of the gunshots reverberated off the walls around me, un-popping my ears as they did so, I began to make out Red’s screaming, which snapped me out of the trance that I was in and back into the present.
“Alf! Go! Go! Run!” His screams became incoherent and morphed into one uproarious growl as he began to deviate from the railway track and towards the factory. I had no idea what the plan was after we made it there, but for now, it was all I could focus on.
It felt good to be running alongside him again, it was almost like we had rewound the clock, and we were both running in our comforting khaki overalls rather than the mucky, unfamiliar civilian clothes that we had been forced to wear.
I wanted to look over at him and smirk, like we had done as we raced each other to our tank, but I simply couldn’t muster up the energy.
What I would have done for a tank now. I wish we had had some sort of transport that we were running for, engine idling and ready to simply gun it out of the area and away into the woods. There we would be able to recoup and take stock of what had just happened. But it wasn’t to be.