Screaming Eagles

^FORTY-ONE COLEY

They came at the front line like a mob. Hundreds of Germans mixed with Allied soldiers stalked across the ground. An army of flesh and clothes that couldn’t remember how to use their weapons. Hundreds led the charge, but there were many thousands behind.

Officers yelled across the assembled men to pick targets carefully. Coley and his squad had been on the run for over twenty-four hours. They hadn’t slept at all, and now they were being tossed right back into the cauldron.

The German POWs were placed under guard, but the men didn’t put up a fight. They kept their mouths shut and watched with grim faces as their own forces came at the Americans.

After a slim resupply effort, they had enough rounds to assist, but there weren’t enough bullets to go around. The artillery had shifted again, and began to rain hell on the enemy, opening up huge swaths of carnage while punching fresh holes in the ground.

Bodies and debris exploded and were tossed into the air. The sound of the bombardment reminded him of how they’d been awoken yesterday. He wanted to go find a hole to hide in, and come back when this was all over.

But he was an officer in the United States Army, and this was his place. Among his men. What didn’t fit into the equation were the automatons that were attacking. They’d seen this and he’d rushed back to report that they’d been attacked by a force of Nazis just like this.

His squad gathered around him and started to pour firepower on the advancing horde.

“S’like a bunch of damn zombies, sir!” Harpham shouted over the noise.

“Like a what?”

“Seen this movie a couple of years ago at the cinema, called King of the Zombies. These guys are acting like zombies.”

“You think Hitler invested technology in voodoo mysticism and this is the result?” Coley said.

“I don’t know a damn thing about voodoo, sir, but look at them. Most of the soldiers don’t fight, they just walk. Mindless. Like, you know, zombies.”

A blast of machine gun fire made them hunker down. A GI a few feet away slumped to the dirt with a hole in his helmet, and stared at the sky.

“That looks like bullets to me, Private,” Coley said.

“No tactics. No order. They’re just imitating what they did before they got turned,” Harpham said.

Voodoo? That was crazy talk.

But there was no denying what he was seeing. There was no way to hide from this force. During his brief engagement with German soldiers, they’d shown more or less sound tactics, but this was not even organized chaos.

Coley poked his head back over the top of the hastily-dug hole and put a requisitioned M1 to his shoulder. He aimed and fired until the clip sang as it sailed into the air.

The men around them loaded, fired, and loaded again, but it had little effect on the mass of men that were coming at them.

He dug out another clip, and thought very carefully about how much ammunition he had left. They weren’t going to be able to stop army. There simply weren’t enough men, weapons, and ammo.