Red Devils

4

The scars of war were everywhere he looked. Craters, bodies, burned-out vehicles… Wilkins came upon the remains of a jeep which had ploughed into a tree at such speed that its chassis had virtually wrapped around the trunk. Its driver and passenger remained trapped in their seats, pinned into position by the twisted metal wreck. Wilkins hoped for their sake they’d died on impact and not as a result of the fire which had overwhelmed the accident site. Little of the dead men’s bodies remained distinguishable; all traces of their history, rank, allegiance and military record having been burned away. And yet their skeletal, charred faces remained horribly readable. Both of their mouths were frozen midway through never-ending screams of pain. Their burned out eyes looked up to the heavens for an explanation which would surely never come.

It was uncomfortably quiet here. Unexpectedly so. No fighting. Nothing. A dead zone. Wilkins almost began to wish for an enemy encounter to prove he was still alive. Whether it was as a result of the bitter cold, the after-effects of being left hanging from a tree, the hideous creatures he’d seen since landing in the forest, or a combination of all three, he was beginning to doubt his sanity. Am I the one who has died? he asked himself. It made marginally more sense to believe that the grotesque, borderline surreal things he’d seen were as a result of serious trauma to his brain. He’d witnessed more than his fair share of unspeakable horrors in numerous places since the beginning of the war, but this was different. This didn’t feel right.

He’d been keeping a watch for signs of any of the other Brits, and his heart leapt when he spied parachute material entangled among the lower branches of an oak tree tall enough to be hundreds of years old. He ran towards it at speed, only to find one of his countrymen hanging from a bough and quite dead. It was Graeme O’Neill, a good sort he’d known for some years. Poor bugger. O’Neill had a protruding chin and a distinctive mop of tightly curled and well-oiled hair, so there was no question it was him. From the waist up, he appeared relatively unhurt, but the lower half of his body had been unspeakably defiled.

O’Neill’s legs had been stripped of all flesh. Little more than blood-stained bones remained, as if the muscles, nerves and sinews had all been eaten away. Directly beneath the dead Brit, the snow had disappeared from a wide circle of ground approaching two yards in diameter, perhaps even larger. Blood and other unspeakable discharge had soaked the forest floor, and there were countless slushy footprints moving to and from O’Neill’s body in numerous directions. O’Neill himself bobbed up and down gently as the branches of the mighty oak rustled in the spiteful winter wind.

All’s fair in love and war, Wilkins remarked to himself, but there was nothing remotely fair or decent about what had happened here. O’Neill had, apparently, been tortured without mercy. A degree of hatred and inhumanity towards one’s enemy was perhaps to be expected in conflict, but this was something else entirely. This desecration of a fellow soldier’s body was senseless. Barbaric in the extreme.

It occurred to Wilkins that whoever was responsible for this most heinous act might still be loitering nearby. However, he owed it to his fallen comrade and his family not to leave him hanging there unceremoniously. He was swinging like an executed man who’d been left on the gallows, chin on his chest and his head hanging heavy on his shoulders. Wilkins looked around and checked that all was clear, then tried to steady the corpse. ‘I’m sorry, old boy,’ Wilkins said. ‘I wish that I could—’

Wilkins jumped back with surprise when O’Neill looked up and fixed him with a gaze from cold and lifeless eyes. Somehow O’Neill’s flailing arms caught hold of him and the dead man attempted to take a bite out of Wilkins’ hand. Wilkins snatched his hand away and staggered back. By now O’Neill was twitching and bouncing tirelessly on the parachute cords which bound him, spinning around furiously to reach for Wilkins again, but succeeding only in tying himself up in knots. The flesh-free bones of his useless legs clattered together like some bizarre kind of voodoo totem or wind-chime designed to keep evil spirits at bay.

Wilkins didn’t believe in evil spirits. Part of him wished he did. Somehow the idea that what was happening here in Belgium could be attributed to the whim of some displeased demi-god was preferable to what he already knew to be the truth. The foul aberrations he’d so far encountered were the result of despicable Nazi experiments. He wanted to run and put maximum distance between himself and this place, but that wasn’t an option. Thousands of lives depended on him and the other men who’d baled out over the region during the early hours of this morning. By all accounts, it was no exaggeration to believe that, perhaps, the lives of every last man, woman and child in Europe, if not the entire world were at risk here.

Before he did anything, though, Wilkins knew he had to deal with what was left of O’Neill first. He couldn’t leave a fellow soldier hanging up there in such a pitiful state. He took his standard issue clasp knife and, with one hand around O’Neill’s throat to keep him steady and keep his snapping jaws at bay, he plunged the blade deep into the dead man’s heart.

It had no effect. Absolutely no effect.

If stabbing the heart doesn’t do the trick, he thought, then I have only one other option.

Wilkins twisted O’Neill’s squirming head to the left and stabbed his exposed temple. Almost immediately the dead soldier stopped thrashing and hung from the tree like an abandoned marionette.

Wilkins wiped his knife clean then dug in against the wind and the cold and the pain and the fear in his gut and pushed on towards Bastogne.