“I was pretty sure things couldn’t get any worse. They were about as bad as they were likely to get in my estimation. That was when I learned that the green thing standing over John Crowley wasn’t the first one the Nazis had made. I guess wherever they’d been put, they responded to the alarm. They marched into the room in perfect unison, wearing outfits that made it clear they were designed to be as scary as possible. They wore SS uniforms and the guns they carried would have looked better on a tank than in their hands.
“That was it for me. I had my limits. I was alone and I had no weapons. I got up from my spot on the ground. I was one story above all of those freaks, and I figured if I stayed I’d either end up dead or like one of those green giants. One of them German boys called frantically to the things and they stopped where they were, falling into formation. The blind one stayed where it was, and the remaining soldiers—living soldiers that is, not zombies in Nazi clothing—breathed a sigh of relief. I took one look down at Crowley, deeply saddened that I’d have to leave his body behind for them to mess with.
“And I almost fainted when he looked back up at me and winked. That grin of his stretching even wider than I’d have thought possible, like he was just having the time of his life. Last I saw of him he was rising from the ground, and he was starting to laugh.
“That laugh of his was worse than the sounds those men had made when they were being operated on. Worse even than the sight of the monster battalion walking into the room. I swear the sounds that came from that man’s mouth shaved five years off my life.
“I went ahead with my plan, and I ran like the Devil himself was on my ass, with the sound of that laughter following me all the way to the entrance of that damned place. I got lost four times trying to get out of the building. I stumbled and I fell and I got up and I ran some more, and through it all, I heard Crowley’s laughter and the screams of the Germans.
By the time I’d reached the door, I saw the rest of my squad looking at me with pale, shaky faces and eyes that were close to mad. Every one of them was hurt, and badly. Between the three of them they’d managed to get one of the green men down and incapacitated. It was still alive, but it was so shot up and torn that it couldn’t move more than to shake and flop like a fish out of water.
“I looked at them in silence for a few seconds while they shot questions at me. Then I looked at the monster they’d stopped; its clothes were torn and shredded like they’d been in a hurricane, and on its forearm I saw a series of numbers. They’d been tattooed in place. I didn’t know what that tattoo meant then, but I figured it out later, after Auschwitz. I saw the fat face, with eyes that looked around and glowed in the darkness, and I shivered. I wondered if the poor thing could still feel and could remember what it had been before the Nazis got their hands on it. That thought still gives me nightmares sometimes.
“Finally, I looked at Sarge and I told him there were more of those things inside and that Crowley was probably dead by their hands. That was enough to get us moving. We didn’t even try looking at one of the trucks the Germans had rode up in, we just started walking, taking turns helping Toby Baker, who’d had his leg crushed by that thing when it came up on them.
The next morning we were trying to hide away again and it would have been easier to do, but even from a couple of miles away we heard the explosions coming from the direction of the château. We didn’t talk about it. We just kept going. Walking when the sun fell and sleeping away the days when we could sleep.
“It was three days before another squad found us. By then we were all in bad shape. I was still doing better than most, but I think my mind was trying to shut down. It didn’t like what it had seen and I guess maybe I ain’t as strong up stairs as I’d like to imagine I am. They have fancy names for what happens in wars. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and I’m sure a few others. Whatever the case, I was almost as numb as I hoped those green men were. Poor Toby lost his leg. The surgeons couldn’t help much after the infection set in properly.
“We told our stories to the commander just the same. We told him where we’d been and what we’d seen. He might not have believed us, except for the trophy Springer had brought along. He’d sawed at one of the monster’s hands, and taken it with him, wrapped in a blanket and tied in place with the sling of his rifle. The major took one long look at the hand and decided we weren’t as crazy as we sounded. The hand was still twitching, trying to do something about where it was. The major looked downright calm as he poured a fifth of scotch over it and set it to burning. His face was pale, his disgust obvious, and his hands shook when he struck the match.
“Two days later one of the men who’d gone up to the château told me about what they had seen, which was mostly a lot of nothing.
“He said ‘The whole building was in ruins, Finch. There wasn’t a part of the walls that wasn’t broken and burnt. We found a lot of bodies, but they were all in bad shape.’ I asked him to elaborate and he did, I also bummed three cigarettes off him while we talked. ‘We went down into that cave you talked about, the sub-basement. There was a lot of stuff down there that had been busted all to hell. I don’t know what those machines they had were supposed to do, but they were melted and shot and a couple of those things that had been bolted to the ground were knocked over and smashed so bad you could barely tell what they were supposed to be. Finch, some of those Germans were damned big men. Like over seven feet tall and that was after the fire got done roasting them. You know how meat gets smaller when it cooks too long? I don’t want to know how big they were before that fire.’
“‘Did you see any Americans?’ I had to ask, Eddie. I had to know if Crowley was down there and dead or if he’d escaped.
“‘I don’t know for sure, Finch. All I know is that nothing was alive when we got there.’ He put a hand on my shoulder as he stood and got ready to leave for his shift. The man looked like he’d seen things he never wanted to think about again. You know the look, Eddie. So do I.
“A week after that I was reassigned. I got my orders and it was back to duty for me, and that was fine. They wanted me on one of the companies heading for Germany and I wanted to be there, because I wanted to lose myself in something other than my own miserable thoughts. I couldn’t take being alone with my memories any longer. I’d have killed someone, I’m certain of it. I kept feeling bad for all the men I’d killed and I kept feeling even worse for the folks they’d made into those things.
“As I was heading for my new squad, being driven down in a truck, I looked out at the sides of the road and tried not to think about the monsters or what I had done. I tried to forget how I’d abandoned Jonathan Crowley. I was thinking about him a lot, and hating myself for leaving him behind, for not even being able to give him a proper funeral like I swore I’d do.
“I wasn’t paying too much attention to the sights, but I always waved to the other soldiers I saw walking along with their gear and those lost looks on their faces. Just a little courtesy to let them know we were all in it together. About halfway to the post they gave me, I spotted another small group walking along the side of the road and I looked up from my hands to wave, and I froze as surely as I would have if I’d fallen into a pit of angry rattlesnakes.
“I looked right into the face of Jonathan Crowley, and I know I must have turned dead white. He looked right back at me and he smiled that nasty smile of his, and he winked.
“We weren’t driving all that fast. It wasn’t possible to drive over the roads in the area at high speed without throwing half the soldiers out the back of the trucks.
“Jonathan Crowley got a running start and caught the back bumper of the truck I was on. I thought I was going to wet myself when he climbed over the gate.
“One of the sergeants tried to question him, but Crowley shut him up with a look and then walked over and sat next to me.” My grandfather shook a bit as he spoke.
“You ever have to leave someone behind, Eddie? Someone you wanted to save and couldn’t?”
&
nbsp; I allowed that I had, and tried not to think about Corporal Murphy, who begged me to come back for him just before the napalm eradicated the spot where he’d been bleeding out on the jungle floor.
“I swear to you, Eddie, I thought he was going to kill me right then and there. I hadn’t seen what was left of the château, but I’d seen the people who came back from it and they came back haunted by what they’d seen as surely as I was.
“‘Finch,’ he said to me. ‘Finch, I thought for sure you got yourself killed up there.’
“I think I whimpered. He was smiling, you see, and that smile of his, damn, Eddie, that smile of his was a frightful thing.
“He reached out and touched my lapels, straightening them as he looked me over. ‘Glad you made it, old son. Listen, you ever need me, you give me a call. I’ll come running. And if not, who knows, maybe I’ll come see you in Summitville. I’ve heard it’s a nice place.’
“He stood back up and climbed over the side of the truck, easy as you please. I watched him as we rumbled by and he gave me a proper salute and then winked at me before the truck took a bend in the road and he vanished from my sight.
“That was the last time I saw him.
“I don’t know what those things were that the Nazis made. I don’t know if they used some science no one knows about, or if they used magic to make them. I heard a lot of rumors about the things Himmler was into, and after what I saw at the château, I don’t know if I can honestly doubt anything like I used to.
“I sure as hell don’t know how Jonathan Crowley survived that place and, frankly, if I never meet him again or find out what he did, it will be too soon.”
My grandfather rose from his seat as he crushed out his last cigarette. He looked around the farm and smiled faintly. “It’s good to be here, Eddie. It’s good to have survived that whole damned war. I still have some memories I don’t like to think about, and now and then, when it’s dark outside, I still have moments when I’m almost sure that the people I killed are waiting for a chance to get back at me for stealing their lives. I did a few things I’m not so proud of, but I did them for the right reasons. I reckon maybe you did, too.”
He said his goodnight, and I saw that my mother had gone to sleep already when my eyes followed him into the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My watch let me know it was after midnight and life on the farm starts early.
We never spoke of the wars we’d endured again, but I pulled myself together after that. I’d survived, and I’d done things I was not proud of, but I was alive and that meant I had to get on with living.
My grandfather died three years later. He died in his sleep, and I hope he died with a good dream playing in his mind, but I suspect I’ll never know for certain.
At his funeral, I saw many an old man from around Summitville. They’d been his friends in some cases, and in others they were just paying their regards to another fallen soldier, one who had survived the war like they had. I saw one young man, too. He was of average height and lean, with brown hair and brown eyes.
When the funeral line was arranged and all of the visitors were saying their condolences to us, the stranger looked at my mother and took her hands gently in his own. He spoke softly and solemnly and said to my mother, “Ben Finch was a fine man. He was a fine soldier. They don’t make them like him any more. He will be missed.”
When he came to me, he spoke just as softly and his hands held mine in a strong grip until I looked him in the eye. “Your grandfather was strong, Eddie. Make sure you honor that. Do wrong by his memory, and we will not be friends.” He smiled when he was done talking and I was the only one that saw it.
He had a smile that looked like it belonged on a killer. He only flashed that smile once after that, when I was looking at him, and either he winked at me, or the wind blew something in his eye.
That night I looked through the register of names from those who’d attended my grandfather’s funeral, prepared to send thank you notes. I noticed the name Jonathan Crowley, but he left no address.
For just a few seconds I wondered if maybe the man I’d seen smiling was the same man who’s smiled at my grandfather so long ago in a château in France. But that just wasn’t possible. He’d have been older, certainly; old and gray and frail.
But I thought about that smile, and I thought about that wink, and I remain uncertain. Like my grandfather, I think if I never meet that smiling man again, it’ll be too soon.
Changeling
A Joe Ledger Adventure
Jonathan Maberry
Author’s note: This story is set after the events in THE DRAGON FACTORY. You don’t have to have read that novel, but if you read this story first there are some spoilers.
-1-
The world keeps trying to kill me.
It’s taking some pretty serious shots and as the months and years pass, it hasn’t lost any of its enthusiasm. Or its deviousness.
I keep sucking air, though. Each time I somehow manage to pick myself up, and either slap off the dirt and stagger back to the fight, or someone medivacs me to an aid station or a trauma hospital and the doctors do their magic to ensure that I have another season to run.
You know that saying how a bone is stronger in the place where it broke? And the thing from Nietzsche everyone and his brother always quotes – about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger? A lot of that is true.
I’m stronger than I used to be. Less physically vulnerable. Not that I have super powers. Bullets don’t bounce off my skin the way they do with Superman, and I don’t have Iron Man’s armor. I don’t have spider sense or adamantium bones.
I’m stronger because each time I survive a fight, I learn from it. I become less trusting, less naïve.
Colder.
Harder.
It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot, and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.
This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.
That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.
And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you turn the dials on passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak – the prey – to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.
Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.
And yet…
And yet.
There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.
Loss.
Grief.
Call it what you want.
On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother in arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe – truly believe – that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.
You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun-smoke clears, and if you’re still alive, then you and the person you love will have a life together afterward. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.
But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on.
Damn.
That’s where the real monsters are made. When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you
to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.
Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realising your defeat.
Or…
Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.
Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.
That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.
But it is the monster that survives.
It’s the monster that can survive.
I loved twice in my life. Really loved.
The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.
Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.
Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.
SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 12