Screaming Eagles

^TWENTY-SEVEN BEHR

Behr and his men finished with the soldiers around the village and set off after the people fleeing in jeeps, but the vehicles outpaced his soldiers in minutes. Behr turned his gaze back on the town below and decided there might still be men to fight down there.

Figures in uniforms, overcoats, and white fought each other to the death. There was confusion and there was screaming.

Behr stumbled among the men. He found a submachine gun and used it, but his hands didn’t respond the way they’d used to. He didn’t take any effort to aim, and instead relied on bursts of fire. When he ran out out ammo, he dropped the weapon and grabbed another.

Snow made a hindrance to his already-sluggish limbs, but he pushed on. The warmth of the men drew him. The ones who were not like him. They needed to and fight alongside Behr for the Fatherland. Anything less would be defeat.

After getting shot in the shoulder, he took a man to the ground.

He looped his arm around another soldier and ripped out the screaming man’s throat.

He tore at a young soldier’s face until one of the man’s eyes was mush in his mouth.

Each time he rose, there was another soldier ready to join their ranks.

Behr eventually came to a halt before an imposing figure.

The man was taller than the soldiers who surrounded him, and dressed in a thick black overcoat. Even Behr’s shattered mind recognized a superior, but not one that gave off the red glow that so enticed him to enact violence. He gave a salute that was slow, but acceptable: hand raised, arm eye level, and hand tilted upward. He knew he was performing the action by rote. He’d performed the salute thousands of times before this moment, so it was mechanical.

Other soldiers gathered around him and offered the same salute to the SS officer.

He had a name and Behr had known it, an hour or maybe a day ago. Now it didn’t matter. This was their commander, and Behr would follow him into the gates of Hell, if that’s what was required.

The SS officer turned from the men and pointed to the west. His mouth was a mass of wounds, with bloody lips drawn back over a shattered set of teeth. One of his eyebrows had been ripped away, the skin torn all the way down his face to his mouth, and it produced a constant snarl.

They followed his gesture and turned as one. He moved among them, the sea of soldiers parting like a wave. When he reached the edge of the town, he kept walking.

The soldiers followed.