Red Devils

2

Lieutenant Joseph Coley of the 394th Regiment, 99th Infantry Division, was as sick of Bastogne and Belgium and of this whole damn war as it was possible for a man to be. He’d seen such things over the last days and weeks as he never could have imagined, and he wondered if there was any chance of normality ever being restored to his life again. It certainly didn’t feel that way. Right now it felt like he was on another planet, like he’d need a rocket-ship to get back home again.

Bastogne was in ruins. It had been an unexpected pressure point in an equally unexpected battle. The Nazis had launched a sweeping offensive across Belgium and taking this place, where the seven main roads through the Ardennes converged, was a key strategic aim, integral to the German plans to push on and take Antwerp. The fighting here since mid-December had been hellish, the besieged population brought to their knees with many of their homes and buildings reduced to rubble.

War is never an exact science, but what happened in Bastogne was beyond the plans and expectations of even the most experienced and war-wise military tacticians. To have had to defend the town against an unexpected enemy surge from one source was testing enough for the allies, but when faced with a second, almost unearthly enemy, the odds of victory had been slashed to all but zero.

Coley had seen countless nightmarish things when he’d last been here, just a few days earlier. Back then, the controlled destruction of a part of the town was just about sufficient to hold back the inhuman army which the allies had faced. Huge, mountainous piles of crumbled masonry had blocked the way and prevented most of them from getting through. But there had been reports that another great wave was on its way, and Coley had headed back with his men to shore up. Seven roads into Bastogne, he remembered, seven ways for them to come at us.

Fighting krauts was one thing – fighting this new threat was another thing altogether. He and his men were already against the ropes before he’d seen what their new enemy was capable of. They’d fought tooth and nail to defend their position, their supplies and ammo running dangerously low, and just as it had seemed that all was lost, the balance shifted. They’d witness the unimaginable – German against German, an enemy mutating and consuming itself – but no matter how it impossible it seemed, it had happened. Coley and his men had made it out of the blood-soaked chaos alive and had taken a handful of German POWs to boot. One of them, Erwin von Boeselager, of the 9th Fallschirmjaeger Regiment, 3rd Fallschirmjaeger Division, was still with him now. This new threat was such that the bitterest of enemies were forced to work together in order to avoid defeat.

Von Boeselager told Coley what he’d known about the situation. He explained that an experimental serum had been developed with the intention of making Nazi soldiers stronger and faster, and whilst there had been some limited success on that score, the devastating side-effects negated all of the potential Nazi gains. It was hard to believe that something of such apparent insignificance had had such a remarkable impact. In a world where the calibre and explosive strength of a weapon had been a precursor to dominance, it seemed perverse to think that so much damage had been inflicted by mere chemical compounds. Molecules so minute that they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye; so much destruction wrought by something which was as good as invisible to man. Too small to see, and too small to defend against.

The Nazi warmongers hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of what they’d unleashed. Wave after wave of crazed, barely controlled, undead soldiers had swarmed through the surrounding region and into Bastogne, and had changed the direction of every hand-to-hand battle in which they were involved. They demonstrated a ruthless combination of traits: no fear, unflagging energy, an inability to feel pain, and absolutely no concept of mercy. Men, women and children, young or old, soldier or civilian, all were targets. And if that wasn’t enough, Coley and von Boeselager had witnessed even more terrifying behaviours. The undead army attacked indiscriminately, regardless of nationality or allegiance. Most worryingly of all, the contagion which had turned these people into vicious, driven killers with a taste for fresh human flesh, was transmitted to their prey through every bite and scratch. The victims of the undead became the undead. People were attacked, killed and conscripted in one fell swoop.

The ever-growing army kept coming, and the allies needed to keep plugging the gaps.

Higgins, late of the 969th Field Artillery Battalion, accompanied Lieutenant Coley alongside von Boeselager and another German, Mathias Altschul, as they rattled along the road back into Bastogne in a battered jeep that had seen better days. Altschul had fled the undead scourge and surrendered to the Americans. In the circumstances, given that the first US troops he’d encountered whilst on the run still had a pulse and the propensity for rational decision making, waving the white flag had seemed the most sensible choice. When you’d been fighting an enemy so hard for so long, however, sudden changes of priority were hard for all concerned to swallow. Higgins leant forward to whisper to Coley. ‘Don’t feel right, Lieutenant, sitting here with a pair of krauts.’

‘Kraut or no kraut, these boys have both got a heartbeat and an off switch. And Mr von Boeselager here helped me out of a scrape, let’s not forget that. I’m under no illusions, son, I know what’s at stake. We need to focus more on what we’ve got to do, less on who we’re doing it with.’

It didn’t sit well, but Higgins knew he was right.

Bastogne was like the Hoover Dam, and they were there to plug the leaks. That was how Lieutenant Coley explained it. Whilst the town had been liberated, the undead army just kept coming. The ruined buildings and blocked streets were just about keeping them at bay, but sometimes the pressure got too much and they broke through. ‘We’re a repair crew,’ Coley told them, ‘here to help stop those leaks becoming a flood.’

The lieutenant’s analogy was apt. At the point they’d been ordered to defend this morning, two buildings had been destroyed, one on either side of one of the roads out of town, all but completely blocking the way through. A 155mm howitzer had since been used to strike the area from a distance, but a stray round had punched a hole in the debris, leaving enough of a gap for an unsteady stream of the undead to pile through. Now Coley and his men stood a short way away, picking off the advancing enemy with M1 carbines.

‘It’s like a goddam shooting gallery,’ Higgins shouted to Coley, and he was right. As the undead appeared – forced over the rubble peaks by the sheer mass of animated bodies following behind – Coley took pot-shots. The distance gave him a few seconds to compose himself and take aim, and it was never anything less than completely satisfying to see the back of some undead kraut’s head explode outwards from a direct hit. Higgins’ action was far more frantic, spraying lead at anything that moved. ‘Twenty-three, twenty-four…’

‘You are keeping count?’ Altschul said, sounding disgusted. ‘This is not a game.’

‘Sure ain’t. I just enjoy counting how many Nazis I get rid of. Something to tell the kids.’

‘Focus, Higgins,’ Coley ordered from over to his right.

Altschul did his best to ignore the American’s banter, and to put from his mind the fact that most of these men – these creatures – they were destroying had once been his fellow countrymen. Had he known any of them before they’d been corrupted and mutated like this? Had he trained alongside them? How close had he himself been to becoming like this, and could it still happen?

Distracted, he allowed his rifle to jam. It took only a few seconds to be ready to fire again, but by then one of the dead was almost upon him. The creature had a vile expression on its twisted face: absolute hatred. Its speed increased as it approached him, hands reaching out as if it couldn’t wait to grab him and tear him to pieces.

Two things saved Altschul – the fact the cadaver lost its footing in the rubble and stumbled, and the single well-aimed shot from von Boeselager which pretty much blew the damn thing’s head clean off its shoulders.

‘I said focus,’ Lieutenant Coley warned.

But Altschul was really struggling. Struggling with the pressure, struggling with the relentless nature of the apparently endless attack, and struggling with the fact that the corpse coming at him now couldn’t have been more than ten years old when he’d died. A small boy, wearing pyjamas soaked with blood, most of the skin and hair burned away from the right side of his head. Altschul fired, and his shot missed and ricocheted off a lump of masonry. He wiped his face and aimed again, but all he could think was that the child looked like his brother Rudolph’s youngest son. The family lived in Würzburg. He was looking forward to seeing them again, once this damn war was over…

‘Altschul!’ Coley screamed at him.

Altschul heard him, but he could barely focus now, could hardly think straight. He lowered his weapon and staggered back, tripping over a rubble-buried kerb and ending up on his backside looking up, watching helplessly as the dead boy continued his advance. From the biggest soldier to the smallest child, they all had the same emotionless gaze and inexorable intent. He kicked out when the child was close, and booted him square in the chest, sending him flying. Altschul could only see the face of his nephew Peter now, and immediately regretted his action. He picked himself up and almost went to help the dead child, now oblivious to the raging gunfight which continued all around him. Coley and Higgins were just about managing to hold back the tide of dead flesh, but they were one man down and losing their advantage. More of them were coming through the gap all the time, and the two Germans were no longer firing. Von Boeselager was moving out to the side. ‘I will try to block the way through,’ he yelled, struggling to make himself heard over the noise. He climbed up onto another mound of rubble which had once been a house, then ripped the pin from a grenade and lobbed it over towards the gap. It detonated with a deafening crack which echoed off the walls of the few buildings which remained standing. Body parts flew in all directions, and a dirty red mist filled the air momentarily. When the dust and debris cleared he saw that he’d succeeded in partially stemming the flow, but more of the dead were still getting through, piling forward with savage intent and no concern for their own physical safety, dragging themselves over what remained of their fallen brethren.

Higgins stopped firing momentarily, distracted by plumes of dust and a shower of broken brickwork which fell from the top floor of a townhouse. The building looked like it had been pounded with artillery fire for days on end and yet, somehow, it remained standing. It was like a movie set: an empty façade, propped up and giving the illusion that normal life continued within its hollow walls. ‘Careful,’ he warned the German. ‘That place don’t look too steady to me.’

But von Boeselager wasn’t listening. He was still focussed on stopping the flow of the river of death. He hurled another grenade and it detonated on the far side of the rubble-strewn gap, close to the dilapidated building.

There was a moment of deceptive calm. It was over as quickly as it had begun.

‘Jeez… everybody outta here!’ Lieutenant Coley hollered, because it was clear that what they’d feared happening had just been triggered. The propped up building wall had been damaged at its base, and the little structural integrity the battered old place offered had just been taken away. It began to topple forward, falling like a book on the end of a shelf. ‘Run! Now!’ the lieutenant screamed.

His men didn’t need to be warned again. They sprinted as fast as they could, but between the dead and the countless obstacle-like remnants of war left everywhere, their progress was terrifyingly slow. Tonnes of masonry began to crash to the ground, crushing many corpses but also releasing many, many more. They surged forward again, from numerous different directions now.

Von Boeselager grabbed Altschul’s arm and tried to drag him away, but his countryman had been reduced to a mere shell of a man, traumatised by all he’d seen. The undead child had been the final straw, and he was simply unable to cope with the wave after wave of decay which now rolled towards him. He stood his ground and continued to fire fruitlessly into the advancing hordes, but there were too many for him. They soon swarmed over him in massive numbers, digging their teeth and fingers into his unprotected skin, and ripping his flesh from his bones.

His agony was brought to an abrupt end when a massive chunk of balustrade dropped from a height and obliterated him and the best part of twenty crazed corpses.

The rest of the collapsing building was falling in on itself now. Higgins tripped as he tried to run, his foot disappearing down into a crater in the middle of what had once been one of the busiest roads into Bastogne but which was now indistinguishable from the rest of the ruination. His boot was trapped by the debris in the hole, and whilst he tried with all his might to pull himself free, he knew his number was up. He looked up and pointlessly covered his head with his hands as tonnes of brickwork and plaster came crashing down on top of him.

Von Boeselager and Lieutenant Coley kept moving back, helping each other and managing to make it to just beyond the danger zone. ‘What have I done?’ von Boeselager asked as the deafening, ground-shaking rumble of the building’s collapse began to fade, but Coley wasn’t in the mood for conversation. The air was filled with slowly sinking clouds of dust. Coley peered through the grit-fuelled smog and saw that much of the building’s frontage had fallen at an angle, collapsing like a domino onto a derelict row of houses adjacent, and bringing half of them down too. The net result: a couple of minutes ago they’d had a clear choice of roads out of here and a single weak point to defend, but now their position was wholly different and far more dangerous. Their jeep was gone, crushed, and rubble blocked three ways out, reducing their escape routes to one. And by God, that escape was now a necessity.

‘Move,’ Coley said to von Boeselager, nerves masking the fear.

‘I thought I could stop them. I thought I could prevent them from getting closer and…’

‘MOVE!’ Coley yelled, and he shoved the German hard between his shoulder blades.

Behind them, behind the mountainous piles of debris, a huge mass of undead bodies had been trapped by chance. They’d been funnelled into an enclosed space through the narrow gap between a church and an abandoned Sherman tank. It had acted like a valve – letting them in, but not letting them back out. The grenade blast and the building collapse had inadvertently released this huge, frenzied gathering of dead flesh.

Von Boeselager glanced back over his shoulder as he ran, and saw the dead spilling through the chaos of the scene and coming after them. Some moved with vicious, almost predatory speed. Some of them, white-suited Nazis, carried weapons, wielding rifles as clubs, seemingly incapable of using them as they were designed. Some of the creatures had, until not long ago, been civilians: innocent victims of the war, now doomed to hunt and kill forever.

Lieutenant Coley ran down the only clear stretch of street, von Boeselager close behind. At the end of a row of battered buildings he took a sharp right and headed along another ruined road. He was vaguely aware of von Boeselager calling after him, but paid him no heed. ‘No, Lieutenant, not that way… you’re going deeper into the town.’

Coley was running on pure adrenalin now, and he wasn’t stopping for anyone, not until he was clear of the hellish hordes still following in dogged pursuit.

Wait.

More of them up ahead.

There were corpses in front of him now, and over to his left too.

He realised too late that he’d run right into the centre of Bastogne’s town square. Von Boeselager caught up with him quickly. ‘This was a mistake, Lieutenant. You have us backed into a corner.’

Coley gasped for breath. ‘Wait, you start throwing grenades around and bring down half the town and set a thousand of those monsters free, and you’re lecturing me about making a bad decision?’

‘Let us argue about it later, Lieutenant, please.’

The German tried to go back in the direction from which they’d just come, but he quickly stopped. There were more corpses emerging from the mist, their numbers impossible to gauge in the encroaching gloom. And more on the other side of them, too. And across the square. They were coming from all directions, converging on this place.

‘Shit,’ Coley said. ‘Honours even. I reckon we both screwed up.’

Their view from roughly the middle of the town square was disappointingly limited. The buildings were as faceless as the dead: empty façades, gaping black windows and doors which mimicked the emotionless eyes of the undead enemy. Around them there were blackened tree stumps, too badly damaged to climb, and burnt-out vehicles which had been mangled beyond recognition, deformed by explosions and heat.

Coley started to run again, but stopped when he was confronted by an approaching wall of undead figures. Von Boeselager had tried to go the other way, but he too had been beaten back. They met again on one side of the square and stood back-to-back. ‘Got any more smart ideas?’ Coley asked.

‘I have two more grenades,’ von Boeselager replied, semi-serious.

‘That ain’t gonna help much.’

The German turned around and shook Coley’s hand. His voice cracked with emotion. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. It has been an honour.’

‘Likewise,’ Coley immediately replied. ‘Now we’ve both still got our weapons. I reckon we should try and get rid of a few more of these damn things while we still can. The more of them we kill, the fewer we leave for everyone else.’

‘Agreed, but promise me one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Save two bullets – one for each of us. I’ve been fighting the whole war, so I am used to the idea of dying. The idea of not dying and ending up like these poor souls, however, is intolerable.’

‘Agreed,’ Coley said, and he aimed his M1 into the crowd and fired off a burst of lead. Von Boeselager followed it up with his penultimate grenade.

Coley moved towards the advancing cadavers as he fired, waving his weapon from one side to the other and mowing down scores of corpses. For each one of them that fell, it seemed that countless more were immediately ready to take their place.

He heard something in a brief pause between shots. He looked over at von Boeselager who’d clearly heard it too. There it was again. A wolf whistle. The high-pitched sound cut through the chaos of everything else. Von Boeselager spotted the source and pointed up. Coley peered through the mist, struggling to concentrate as he divided his attention between looking for a way out and keeping more of the dead at bay. ‘Over here,’ a voice shouted. It sounded miles away, but it wasn’t. Coley eventually saw a figure at a top-floor window, waving furiously. A corpse lurched angrily at the lieutenant, wrong-footing the soldier and getting far too close for comfort, but it was dispatched quickly with a single sniper shot. The back of its head exploded outwards like a balloon filled with crimson-red paint.

Now it was von Boeselager’s turn to take the lead. ‘Come on,’ he said, and he dropped his shoulder and ran headlong into the mob of bodies which had filled the space between their current position and salvation. Coley followed closely, but his legs were tired and each forward step was an effort. He could feel every pace through the worn out soles of his boots, and though it seemed a way out was close at hand, the nearer they got, the farther they seemed to be.

‘Over the wall,’ a voice shouted to them, and Coley was relieved to hear a Brooklyn accent. The thought had struck him that he might be about to put himself at the mercy of a lone pocket of Nazis, but even living Nazis were better than the foul dead things which swarmed around them. Everywhere he looked he saw their horrific, bloodied faces glaring back at him. It was only their comparative individual slowness which allowed him and von Boeselager to get through. Their reactions were dulled somewhat. Maybe the longer they’re dead, the harder it is for them to keep functioning? he thought to himself.

There was someone down at ground level to help, thank God. Coley could see him straddling the low wall they were running towards, his legs tucked away on the safe side. He reached out for von Boeselager and helped him up and over, and Coley was about to stretch his arms up when he felt dead fingers clawing at his back. Several of the creatures grabbed his tunic and he was pulled backwards, deeper into the decaying crowd. A spray of gunfire came from up high, thinning the crowd out sufficiently so that two more soldiers could vault over the wall and help the lieutenant to safety. One of them carried a bowie knife and he moved from corpse to corpse to corpse, grabbing each of them in turn by the scruff of the neck, plunging the blade into their temple, then dropping them down again. ‘Don’t know how the hell you do that so fast, Escobedo,’ his colleague remarked.

When sufficient numbers of corpses had been beaten away, the men helped Coley over the wall and into the ruin of a building in which they’d been hiding. Coley climbed the rickety stairs without question or hesitation, figuring that whatever was waiting for him up top couldn’t be any worse than what he’d just escaped down at ground level. He caught up with von Boeselager at the top of the steps. The German had his arms raised in surrender. ‘It’s okay,’ Coley said, breathless. ‘He’s with me. He’s on our side.’

‘A damn kraut?’ an older-looking soldier asked from across a spacious, but largely empty room. The man lovingly cradled a Remington M1903, no doubt the weapon which had saved Coley’s bacon a couple of minutes earlier.

‘Yes, soldier,’ Lieutenant Coley said. ‘A damn kraut.’

‘Now let’s not get off on the wrong foot here, fellas,’ another man said from the opposite corner of the room. He stepped forward and saluted, then made a point of shaking both Coley’s and von Boeselager’s hands. ‘I’m Jim Parker, late of the 101st.’

‘Good to see you, Lieutenant,’ Coley said. ‘Joe Coley, 99th Infantry Division.’

‘Good to see you too.’ Parker gestured at the sniper by the window. ‘This here’s Kenny Gunderson, and these young fellas who escorted you upstairs to our luxury abode are Escobedo and Johnson.’

‘The help was appreciated, gentlemen,’ Coley said. ‘We got ourselves into something of a spot out there.’

‘That you did,’ Parker agreed. ‘But it’s no great surprise. Take a look from our birds nest up here.’

The room in which they’d gathered was on the third floor of a block which had been so badly battered by artillery fire that it felt like it was swaying in the cold winter wind. Coley realised that was an illusion, perpetuated by the fact that all the windows in this place had been blown out, allowing every gust and breeze to blow straight through. Although desperately cold and inhospitable up here, its height, combined with the fact that many other buildings in the centre of Bastogne had been flattened in the fighting, gave the men a panoramic view of the devastation in all directions. But it wasn’t the ruination Coley was interested in, rather it was the scores of vicious bodies which filled the square below and spilled out into the streets in almost every direction.

Von Boeselager was visibly shaken by what he could see. ‘It was enough of a battle to get up here,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine how we will ever get out again.’

‘Yep,’ Escobedo said, sitting in a corner and drawing his legs to his chest to block out the cold as he cleaned his knife, ‘that’s about the short and the tall of it.’

‘Why d’you think we’re perched up here like this?’ Johnson added. ‘If we coulda gone, we woulda gone.’

Coley looked down into the town square from which he and von Boeselager had just made their desperate escape. The amount of dead flesh down there appeared endless, and with the rest of Bastogne all but abandoned, there was nothing else left to distract the infernal army. They weren’t going anywhere fast. ‘It’s like hell on Earth,’ he said under his breath.

‘That it is, that it is,’ Parker agreed. ‘I’d like to say you get used to looking at it after a while, but that’d be a lie. You don’t. I figure things like this we’ll carry to the grave. We’ve been stuck up here a couple days now and, tell you the truth, I’ve pretty much stopped my men from looking out. See, the deeper you look, the worse it gets.’ He put a hand on Coley’s shoulder and pointed down. ‘See what I’m saying? Those two down there, they’re nothing more than children.’

Coley quickly spotted the two dishevelled creatures he’d been pointing out. Small and blood-stained, they’d clearly failed to escape the fighting which had consumed their town.

‘Man, the little ones creep me out,’ Escobedo said from down on the floor. ‘Ain’t no difference between them and the krauts out there.’

‘He’s not wrong,’ agreed Gunderson. ‘Don’t matter how big or small they are, kid or no kid, find yourself facing one of those damn things and you need to move fast. They’ll rip your heart out soon as look at you.’

‘There’s thousands of them,’ Coley said. The scale of the undead army had been apparent from down at ground level, but being up here added a whole new sense of perspective. A sense of perspective he decided he could have well done without.

‘And our boys too,’ Parker continued, pointing into another part of the crowd where a pack of figures milled in tattered and dust-covered, yet instantly recognisable uniforms. ‘Our boys fighting alongside kids and Nazis. I never thought I’d see the day.’

‘You must put your preconceptions and prejudices to one side,’ von Boeselager said. ‘These creatures are on no one’s side but their own. Men, women, Americans, Germans, British, young, old… once the effects of the serum have been passed onto them, there is no hope. We are all standing at the very gates of hell. All of us.’