SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

A Time of Blood Kirsten Cross

A huge, sickly-yellow moon hung over Salisbury Plain. This was no glorious, golden ‘Hunter’s Moon’, resplendent in the heavens and, thanks to an optical illusion of cosmic proportions, apparently thousands of miles closer than it would be normally. This wasn’t a moon worthy of salutation by a bunch of druids pratting around in white sheets. This was a greasy yellow orb, producing a phosphorescent glow that made healthy plants look diseased and wasted, and trees on the skyline take on the appearance of twisted, deformed skeletons.

The Stones loomed on the horizon like silent sentinels — guardians of a landscape saturated in legend, death, war, and blood. At night, shadows clustered around the mighty Sarsen obelisks like the spectral fingers of long-dead ancestors who had raised them up thousands of years before, caressing the pits and ruts on the weathered surface. Stonehenge was a monument to man’s ingenuity, a testament to his ability to create something astonishing, and a demonstration of his fear of what terrible reprisals the Gods might rain down upon the land and tribe if homage wasn’t forthcoming, usually in the form of blood sacrifices.

Many theories had been bandied about concerning the Stones.

They were a temple.

A meeting place.

A shrine for the dead.

A celebration of the solstices.

The truth? Nobody really knew. So the new age brigade and the ‘Druids’ laid claim to the place, sanitising it and diluting its majesty with drumming, chanting and a shit-load of hugging and love-ins. They conveniently airbrushed out the bloodier facet of the Stones’ past in this hippy-trippy interpretation. A brutal, savage past. Just like the unforgiving landscape, these Stones didn’t care if you sang to them, drummed at their feet or laid out the entrails and still-beating heart of a human sacrifice on the ground to please the Gods. They were stone. They were immortal — reminders of a time of blood.

Sergeant Mick Jones of Her Majesty’s own arse-kicking bastards, 2Para, stared at them and sniffed, singularly unimpressed. Lumps of rock. Admittedly, bloody big lumps of rock, but nevertheless, just lumps of rock. But there was something odd about them, even from this distance. He frowned and muttered to himself quietly. “Ya know? I swear them buggers look bigger in the dark.”

“Yeah. That’s what he says about his cock.” Snorts of laughter in the darkness were followed by a sharp rebut.

Mick rounded on the nearest crouched figure and snarled. “Cox, shut your damn mouth and keep your eyes open!”

“Oh, lighten up, for Christ’s sake! It’s an exercise, Sarge! Seriously, how the holy hell did you actually manage to get through the obstacle course during basic with that stick jammed up your arse?”

“Daft bastard wants to be a Rupert, don’t ya, sweetheart? Trouble is, he couldn’t make the cut at Sandhurst.”

“Fuck off, Jonno.”

“That true then, Sarge?”

“Bollocks.”

“So that’s a yes, then?”

“Go fuck yourself!”

Gary Cox giggled. “Is that an order, sir? Because I know for a fact there’s a steaming hot little redhead in the pub we passed about half an hour ago. Just want to make sure I keep my pecker up for Queen and country, sah!” Cox ripped off a salute and the rest of the unit chuckled.

Mick Jones glowered at the gloomy hump he presumed was Private Gary Cox. “You know who’s playing the enemy, Cox? Those mad fuckers from Hereford. They’d probably take great delight in relieving you of your pecker and presenting it to Brenda as a trophy! I promise you son, they don’t know the meaning of the words down time.”

“Nor do you, you uptight twat.” The muttered comment came out of the darkness.

“Go fuck yourself with a cactus or something, Armstrong!”

Jones could practically hear Phil Armstrong’s eyes rolling in the dark, and wasn’t in the least surprised when the college-educated twat started getting all pedantic. “Cacti, you ignoramus. And cacti are not indigenous to Wiltshire. I could try go fucking myself with a stick of rhubarb or summat, if that would make you feel better about life in general?”

“Actually, you know Phil, as much as it pains me to say, he was correct. Cactus is the singular of cacti. Theoretically, you’d only need one cactus to go fuck yourself, not several.”

“How much rhubarb would you need?”

“Wait, what? What is wrong with you people?” Jones now had to get a particularly unpleasant mental image involving rhubarb out of his mind’s eye.

“A whole fucking crumble’s worth, mate. Goes limp quickly, see?” Jonno giggled like a schoolgirl.

“Just like Jonesy.” Cox’s reply was predictably caustic.

“Fuck off, Cox. And seriously? You’re weird, Jonno.”

“I’m not the one comparing rhubarb and cacti as sex toys. Now that’s weird.”

Jones lost his shit. “For the love of fuck will you lot belt up! Eyes open, mouths shut!”

An uneasy silence descended over the Unit. In the privacy of the darkness, Mick Jones glowered at the crouched figures, waiting for one of the smart-mouthed bastards to start up again. They were a bloody disgrace to the uniform. This wasn’t his first time out on the Plain leading a unit of wet-behind-the-ears rookies, but it was crystal that these little bastards had bugger-all respect for him or for the situation they were in. These weren’t serious soldiers. These were fuck-abouts. Why the hell they hadn’t joined the Territorials instead of the regulars, he’d never know.

Salisbury Plain could be a weird old place. You could get mazed out here. Turned around. The official term was ‘royally fucked up’.

The huge open sky could feel like it was pressing down on you, crushing the life out of your body and the air out of your lungs. The way the wind howled around the Stones sounded like children crying. The massive slabs seemed to tower three times higher at night, and there were rumours that the closer you got to the Stones, the more likely it was that your equipment would start going haywire. You needed to stay sharp. Alert. Focused.

Mick felt alienated.

Alone.

Angry.

So bloody angry.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to have been. He had wanted to follow his dad into the Paras ever since he was a nipper. Now he was here, and determined to do the memory of his dad proud. His old man had copped a bullet in Belfast just two days before the withdrawal. Dumb luck shot for the IRA bastard pulling the trigger. Shit out of luck for his dad. That had brought it home to him. This wasn’t a fuck-about job for numbnuts. People died. This was a job for professionals. And this bunch of pillocks were making a mockery of everything he believed in.

The anger frothed in his brain, setting his heart pounding and his teeth on edge. Just at the limit of his senses, he could almost hear his dad’s voice whispering: “They’re laughing at you, son. At me. At the Regiment…”

Anger. So much anger. Choking, vomit-inducing anger.

A boiling, churning rage that turned his guts into knots and made his throat tighten. An anger so utterly consuming it made him want to let loose a primal scream, tear his clothes from his body and bludgeon every one of those pathetic dick-cheeses who had the bloody nerve to call themselves his ‘oppos’ to death with his bare hands.

It was the same kind of anger he’d felt when he’d walked into a pock-marked mud-brick building in Helmund and found it littered with the bodies of dead children. All girls. The local schoolteacher had had the audacity to teach little girls to read. The Taliban had disagreed with that policy. They didn’t make particularly good school governors. And they’d disagreed by using AK47s on the helpless children and their teachers. They’d spared the boys.

Jones had felt his heart break as he listened to the tortured wailing of children, terrified and alone. Vomit on the floor, shit and piss everywhere. They’d got the all clear to go in after an ATO had dealt with an IED strapped to the doorframe. Finally, they’d managed to get the little boys out, but it was too late for the eleven girls. A pile of bodies lay in a lake of blood. But then, a tiny, filthy finger had twitched, causing three fully-grown and battle-hardened men to jump out of their skins. They’d scrabbled to dig the child out from underneath the bodies of the dead, but as Jones had scooped her up in his arms, she’d gasped a final death rattle and fallen limp in his arms. That rasping, final breath had echoed in Jones’ mind for months afterwards.

That was an understandable trigger for that eyeball-aching rage that descended. But why was the flippancy of a few newbies causing him to feel the same way? Was it because they were belittling the seriousness of what was out there? Or had he brought some of the war back home with him?

Now it seemed the little girl’s death rattle was surrounding him on Salisbury Plain, as if the ghost of that child had followed him thousands of miles from that sad little grave in Helmund Province.

He looked up again at the Stones. They seemed to shimmer, resonating that gasping, rasping noise of a dying child’s last breath back at him, but intensifying and amplifying it a thousand-fold.

Briefly he tried to get back control. For a split second he knew that he was having the mother of all flashbacks. No. Not now. Not fucking now! He was on night manoeuvres with those nutjobs from Hereford after them, babysitting a bunch of newbies who didn’t know their arses from their elbows. Not fucking now, for Christ’s sake! Not now! He needed to focus. Jones shook his head, trying to clear the fog of the flashback; getting the images of dead children out of his mind. These little shits might be newbies, but the last thing they needed was their UC going fruitloops on them in the middle of a night exercise.

But every time he looked at the Stones, the rage seemed to intensify. He stared at them, mesmerised. They filled his world with a white-hot fury that flooded his brain with adrenaline. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. The confusion of images started to thin out and his focus turned to Gary Cox.

His smirking face.

His smart-arse one liners.

His total disrespect for the chain of command.

Mick’s consciousness started to shift. He couldn’t focus on the mission. All he could think about was what he’d like to do to that son of a bitch.

A resonant hum seemed to be punching and pulsating through his skull, making his brain vibrate, and sending savage images cascading through his mind. Images that were so real, so foul, so gloriously violent…

A pile of bodies, contorted and soaked in blood. That strange pulsating movement underneath the surface of the skin as the maggots started to do their work. His detached consciousness walked through the carnage, seeing through unfamiliar eyes. A sense of hunger filled him — a five thousand-year-old hunger that demanded to be sated…

He would stand up. He’d walk over to Cox, as silent and as unfeeling as the Sarsen Stones that stood silently on the skyline. He’d stand over him, examining his victim, savouring the rising smell of fear and uncertainty that tainted the air like acrid smoke. He’d reach down, slicing the cloth of Cox’s jacket aside with his knife. Clawing his fingers, he’d force them through the soft, yielding skin, sinking through flesh, pushing aside the other organs — they could be spread at the feet of the stones later for the ravens to dine upon.

He’d ignore the screaming, the frantic and futile grabs by his victim at his wrist as his hand sunk deeper into the man’s chest. He’d feel the pulsating, throbbing heart, pumping furiously, as if it knew it was about to be torn from the warm safety of the body.

His fingers would close around the pump and slowly, agonisingly slowly, he would tear out Cox’s beating heart and hold it up, blood dripping between his fingers, paying no attention to the pathetic bastard’s pleas for mercy and blood-frothed gurgles as he died.

He’d lick the still warm heart, letting the blood and fluid coat his tongue, savouring its deliciousness, He’d take a bite and swallow, letting the hot lump of tissue slide down his throat, the coppery flavour filling his mouth, giving him strength, vigour, power.

Then he would crush what was left of the organ between his fingers, amused by the sheer fragility of the soft muscle tissue as he turned what was the most precious of all organs into a useless mush of bloody pulp.

The images were so real.

Was he actually doing it?

Or was it some kind of horrific, waking nightmare?

No. Not horrific.

Sensual.

Powerful.

God, the rush of power he would feel would be unlike anything he’d ever experienced! He was getting a feeling of sexual arousal as the images in his mind became more and more vile. He could feel a pressure building behind his eyeballs and screwed his lids tight shut, fearful that they’d pop out like a couple of ping-pong balls shot out of a Thai whore’s fanny…

“Movement! On the left!” Jonno let out a hoarse whisper.

Mick’s eyes snapped open and he swivelled around. Cox was still very much alive, his beating heart still firmly ensconced in his chest. Mick battled as hard as he could not to puke like a drunken teenager, swallowing back the mouthful of vomit that threatened to spew out.

What the fuck just happened?

He fought back against his body’s gag reflex and tried desperately to snap himself back into the here and now. Sweat poured down the back of his neck, even though the wind was icy cold and the temperature was nudging the ‘brass monkey’ zone.

Barrack-room banter was instantly forgotten. Any second now a couple of flash-bangs followed by a beating of epic proportions would descend on their heads like a huge, painful pile of SAS-shaped crap. The Hereford crew had a tendency to forget they were on ‘exercise’ and go in hard and fast. Not surprising, really. It’s what they were trained to do. Trouble was, sometimes they forgot that the ordinary squaddies from 2Para were on the same damn side as they were.

Jones and his team took the exercise seriously, but in all honesty, with deployment to the Falklands just a few weeks away now, how relevant was a night exercise on Salisbury Plain to their training? Sure, the Plain had the same kind of unfeeling, unkind and windswept remoteness that the islands of the South Atlantic had, but was there one single penguin within a thirty-mile radius to their present position? Was there fuck.

And why ask Hereford to play the enemy anyway? Bit of a sledgehammer/nut scenario, really. For all the good it would do, you might as well get the bloody Catering Corps to play the bad guys and come at them with spatulas, egg whisks and their notoriously liberal attitude to ‘Best Before’ dates.

Mick scanned the horizon, then cursed himself for being such a FNG. The 22^nd wouldn’t stand on the skyline like extras from a dodgy cowboy film. They’d stay low. Hidden. Unlike Bravo Unit, they wouldn’t be wearing MTP cammo. They’d be in their usual ninja black.

“Boo!”

Mick spun around, swinging the SA80 up — and straight into the line of fire of a C8. His gaze travelled away from that snuffling snout, up the barrel and towards a pair of steel-hard eyes peering from behind the slot in a black balaclava. “Oh, bollocks! C’mon!.”

“Bang, bang. You’re dead, fella. Shit, that was too fucking easy.” The owner of the eyes gave a little chuckle, and lowered his gun. “Seriously. We’re what, two hours in? Did you stop off for a Maccy D’s or summat? They did tell you we were coming for ya, right?” The eyes squinted in a frown. “Jesus, fella, you look like absolute hell. You need a medic?”

“Perhaps you literally frightened the crap out of the little gobshite.” A harsh Scottish accent came out of the dark, presumably from one of the other 22^nd members.

He looked around to see each member of his Unit in exactly the same position as him, and to a man they were all staring at the business end of a bunch of C8s. When you were playing with these guys, you really, really hoped they’d remembered to put blanks in. The 22^nd had done it again. He looked back to his captor, anger boiling up once again — that insatiable, unstoppable anger. He could feel his cheeks burning like someone had chucked napalm in his face. “You were supposed to give us a two hour head start!”

“Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, Shirley Temple! You think the enemy’ll go ‘One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred! Coming! Ready or not!’, do you? What are you, five?” The black-clad soldier grabbed Mick by the neck and hauled him to his feet. “Tell you what, princess. Lucky for you, I got sucked off last night by a blonde with the biggest tits you’ve ever seen in your life, so I’m in a relatively jovial mood. Know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna cut you some slack, fella. But so help me God, you tell anyone and I’ll personally bend you over the heel stone in yonder monument and buttfuck you ‘til you scream, got it? You have exactly five minutes to bugger off.” He looked at Mick and leaned in. “Are… you… still fucking here?”

“Move out!” Mick didn’t need telling twice; nor did the other lads in Bravo Unit. They grabbed their kit and yomped out of there like the devil himself was after them. They needed cover, and they needed to be as far away from the mocking laughter of the 22^nd as they could.

“Oh, and watch out for the grunt crushers! They’re trundling around due north of here! You can’t miss ‘em, mate, they’re those fuck-off great green things with tracks and a bloody great gun sticking out the front!”

The words and the laugher were finally lost on the wind. Now all Jones could hear was the sound of his team’s ragged breathing as they stumbled over the uneven ground, eyes forward, trying to avoid the plough ruts that would snap a misplaced ankle like a twig. “Keep to the left of the Stones! And stay tight!” He threw the words back over his shoulder, not knowing or even caring if his Unit heard him. He kept running, trying to put as much distance between him and those Hereford nutters as he could. He knew this unexpected second chance would be their only one. After this, there would be no quarter given. But Bravo Unit were Parachute Regiment Pathfinders. It was their job to work as scout units, evade enemy patrols, get as far behind enemy lines as they could, recon, and then — and this was the tough bit — get back again with intel and a way in. Satellite imagery might have made some of their job redundant, but there was nothing that could compare to ‘eyes on the ground’, gut instinct, and an up close and personal approach.

What Jones and the rest of his unit didn’t want right now was another up close and personal interaction with the black-clothed bastards behind them. They didn’t have five minutes. He knew the 22^nd would be on their heels within seconds.

The sound of laboured breathing made him glance sideways. Keeping pace but struggling under the weight of a 30lb kit bag and an extra few kilos of SA80 was Cox. The newbie glanced back, meeting Jones’ eyes. The cocky, self-assured personality of before had evaporated. Yeah. Staring down the barrel of a C8 will do that to a man.

The two men stumbled forward over the uneven ground, making painfully slow progress towards the Stones. It felt like running through treacle. Jones suddenly wished that some of his civilian mates could do this. Try running over a ploughed, muddy field carrying a shit-load of kit in the pitch black with a bunch of insane SF bastards baying for your blood sometime, and then fucking tell me that life in the modern army is piss easy, he thought viciously to himself.

“Sarge, where’re we headed?” Cox’s words came in between gasps. The going was, in horseracing terms, soft to shitty.

“There’re some old bunkers close to the Stones. We can hold a position there.

“You serious? There’s only one way in! We’d be cornered!

“We’d have a defensive position, you prick! And they’d be walking straight into a shitstorm of our making for a change! Now pick up the fucking pace!” Jones shoved Cox in the small of the back, sending him stumbling forward.

“I’m just sayin’…”

“Fuck me, are you seriously questioning my order when we’ve got the 22^nd climbing up our arses? Move!” The shove this time was a damn sight harder and Cox measured his length into what looked like a soft pile of mud, but had a distinctively musky odour that suggested to Jones that it wasn’t.

“Cunt!”

“On your feet, soldier!” Jones ignored the insubordination, grabbed the webbing strap on Cox’s backpack and hauled him to his feet again. “Run!” Another shove and Cox jogged forward, muttering darkly and spitting out globules of ‘mud’.

Jones stumbled forward another dozen steps. It was rough going that sucked the energy out of your legs in seconds, making them feel like they were turning into lead. Every step became harder. Jesus, I’m getting too old for this shit! Without warning the ground gave way beneath his feet. He tumbled head-first into a void, closely followed by the yodelling Cox. ”Bollocks!”

He tumbled and spun, crashing painfully into unyielding walls and finally landing in a grunting heap on a hard, uneven and slimy floor. For a few seconds he lay motionless, trying to get his bearings and to quell the sense of panic that falling any great height without a packet of silk and a ripcord attached to your back generates in a member of Airborne.

Finally, Cox let out a string of expletives. “What the actual fuck…”

“Bunker, Cox. We’ve dropped into a bunker, that’s all. Stay calm.” Jones shoved the prone newbie off him and stood, switching his head-torch on.

The two men looked around the chamber. “Bunker, huh? So they used stone slabs to line their bunkers during the Cold War then, did they?” Cox pressed a hand into the small of his back and arched his body. “Shit, Sarge. I thought dropping on you I’d have a bit of a cushion. But you’re knobblier than a sackful of rocks!” He flexed again. “I think I’ve cracked a rib!”

“Jesus H Christ, will you please give your damn mouth a rest for two seconds!” Jones stared at the walls, puzzled. This was no Cold War concrete bunker. For starters, it was circular. And huge. And as Cox had so ably pointed out, it was also lined with stone.

Jones stood and dusted himself off. As his eyes adjusted to a different kind of darkness, he could see that the chamber they had so unceremoniously landed in was huge. And it stank. Dear God, it stank! A vile odour you could practically chew. It made the air feel thick and suffocating, like being smothered by a rancid blanket. The curved ceiling of the chamber was lost in an ocean of thick, black shadows that made it feel oppressive and much lower than it actually was. In the middle of the inky blackness was a slightly lighter patch — the break in the ground they’d tumbled through. The gap was framed by whiskers of silhouetted grass stems, and Jones could make out a few distant stars twinkling above. Gronking to itself, a raven flapped lazily across the night sky, its guttural calls echoing around the landscape.

Not a bunker, then. Something older. A tomb, perhaps? One of the barrows that littered the landscape? There were plenty of them, most of which had been excavated by archaeologists over the years. Was this one of the hundreds that had already been documented across the south of England, dating back to a darker, more savage and bloody era? Or was it a previously undiscovered one, secreted away for thousands of years?

Jones sniffed, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The smell in here was truly god-awful, like someone had left a whole box full of dead rats out in the sun. “Right then. We’re stuck in a shitty old tomb that smells worse than your mother’s fanny. If we were archaeologists, I guess we’d just about be pissing our pants with excitement right about now. But seeing as we’re serving soldiers in Her Mage’s army, it’s now our duty to get out of here in one piece and report this as a hazard. This fucker’s big enough to swallow a grunt crusher whole, and that roof couldn’t support our weight, let alone sixty-two tons of Challenger Two.” Jones looked up to the gap in the roof. “Bollocks. Even standing on my shoulders, you’re not gonna reach that.”

“Sarge, the entire US basketball team standing on each other’s shoulders couldn’t reach that!” Cox’s voice sounded strained. “Try radioing for help.”

Jones pulled his comms out of its holder and depressed the squawk button. Nothing.

Jones tried the radio three more times, battling to suppress a rising sense of panic. He didn’t like this dark, enclosed space, even if it was the size of a cathedral. He balled his hands into fists, trying to disguise the tremor that shook his normally steady fingers.

Jones pulled out his mobile phone. “No bars.” Shit. Shit, shit, shit! He jammed the phone back into his pocket. So they had no comms, no way up to the surface, and nobody knew where they were. And… seriously, what the hell was that smell? “Cox, have you shat yourself or something?” Jones switched to breathing through his mouth.

“Fuck off!” Cox’s voice was sounding more panicked by the second.

Jones sniffed again and almost threw up. The smell was getting stronger… and now he recognised it for what it was. It was the same stench that had hit him like a wall when he’d walked into that Taliban slaughterhouse in Helmund. It was the smell of decomposing flesh, body fluids and putrefaction. “Jesus!” He gagged and put a hand over his mouth. It was coming in waves now, and it was worse every time they moved. “Stand still, Cox.”

“Why?”

“Just stand still!” Jones aimed his headtorch at the floor and nearly vomited on the spot. In the bright, white spotlight he could see the entire floor was slick and covered in slime. It had a marbled appearance, with swirls of darker patches in a larger expanse of paler fluids. He crouched and touched a gloved finger to the floor. As he brought his hand back up, a strand of jelly-like goo stuck to his glove, the viscosity the same as baby snot. He stood and flicked the disgusting stuff off his glove. He knew exactly what the slime was. And it wasn’t baby snot, that was for damn sure.

“Sarge…”

“Easy, Cox. Easy.” Jones could now hear genuine fear in Cox’s voice. Not so cocky now, are you, you smart-mouthed little shit? he thought viciously. But the newbie was under his protection, despite his earlier and deeply disturbing mental image of ripping the son of a bitch’s heart out of his chest. His job now was to get them out of here, and quickly.

Jones stood in the middle of the chamber, directly underneath the hole that led to the outside world — a world where the floor wasn’t coated with the rotting remains of decaying bodies. A world where the darkness didn’t press in on you like a vice. A world where horrific thoughts of disembowelling your fellow man could be dismissed as a sick by-product of PTSD, and talked through with a shrink over a nice cuppa and a biscuit. In here, in the womb of the earth and so close to the ritualistic carnage that had saturated this landscape in blood for centuries, the familiar form of an SA80 didn’t seem to be such a comfort.

Jones tried to quell the panic he felt was about to hit him like a tsunami. He scanned the chamber, and the spotlight of his torch revealed a stone-lined wall so well made you wouldn’t be able to get a blade between the unevenly shaped slabs, let alone your fingertips. As he did a three-sixty rotation, the torch beam landed on a much larger lump of stone and he stopped in his tracks. Carefully, in case the slime caused him to lose his footing, he made his way over to the massive stone.

“Sarge, for fuck’s sake, talk to me!” Cox’s panic was now clearly audible.

“Stop panicking, fella. We’re not dead yet. So calm down and breathe slowly. Preferably through your mouth. If you’re gonna throw up, do it in a corner. Somewhere I’m not going to step in it.” He ignored the sounds of Cox dashing to the side of the void and throwing his guts up, focusing only on the massive megalith in front of him. “We must be right next to the Henge. This looks like the arse-end of one of the Sarsen Stones.”

“How’s that possible?” Cox spat the last remnants of bile from his mouth and straightened, feeling slightly better for voiding ration pack number sixteen out of his twisted guts.

“What, you think the bloody things levitate, you daft sod? They’re buried into the ground, how do you think they stay up? There are legends about underground chambers beneath the Stones, but shit, I thought it was just a bunch of new age bollocks…”

Jones slowly reached out his hand and brushed his fingertips over the surface of the stone.

The jolt threw him backwards clear across the chamber.

He landed and slid through the slime on his arse, trying to stop himself from slamming into the opposite wall. His headtorch went spinning across the floor, the light dancing and contorting like a ballerina on acid. It smashed into the side of the chamber, then blinked out. Jones finally came to rest a few inches from the wall, feeling like he’d just been hit with the mother of all tasers. He gasped, unable to get a lungful of the putrid air. Jones felt Cox cradling his head and heard the panicked man’s voice at the edge of hearing, but couldn’t respond. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and a million ants were crawling all over his body. He shook violently, his muscles convulsing and twitching as he tried to focus on bringing his breathing under control.

“Sarge! Jesus Christ! Sarge!”

The shock sent Jones’ brain into shutdown mode. His oppo’s words became muffled and distant, as if Cox was shouting at him from the opposite side of a parade ground. He wanted to tell Cox that he was okay, but that was a bloody lie. He quite clearly wasn’t. And Cox’s obvious inability to function under extreme stress was starting to send the younger man spinning towards full-on hysteria. Well, tough titties, kiddo. Your sergeant’s down. It’s up to you, now. It’s called ‘teamwork’, fella…Jones started to embrace the unconsciousness that kept threatening to overwhelm him…

Cox cradled Jones’ head, instinctively pressing two fingers to his neck to check his pulse. He felt about a hair’s breadth away from total pissing your pants and crying for your mummy meltdown. He held Jones in his arms, trying to comprehend what had just happened and to shut out the crushing fear that was filling him. He was not normally that bothered by the dark or enclosed spaces — he’d always believed that they were phobias only pussies got. But right now those pussy phobias seemed to contain other, more threatening horrors. Where were the bodies that had produced the copious amount of corpse fluids that turned the floor into a slime-covered, foetid skating rink? Why had his sergeant just been thrown across the chamber after touching the foot of the Sarsen Stone?

And was his terrified imagination playing twisted tricks on him, or did a part of the blackness have a distinctly bipedal form?

He turned his headtorch towards the spot, expecting the beam to light up a human form; please God, perhaps one of the 22^nd who’d yomped down the hole and was going to pull them to safety.

There was nothing there. The shadow form had slid sideways to just beyond the edge of the beam, away from the light. Still cradling the drooling, semi-conscious Jones in his arms, Cox swivelled his head, sending the torchlight scampering across the stones. No matter where he looked, that bipedal form was always just out of the path of the beam.

His headtorch flickered and dimmed. “Oh, no, no, No! Shit! C’mon, do not do this!” He batted the side of the torch, willing the beam to power up again, but the torch suddenly winked out. The chamber was plunged into darkness. But at last a shred of his training kicked in as Cox remembered his NVGs perched on his helmet. He flicked them down and suddenly looked out into an eerie, vivid green chamber.

Glancing down, he could see the prone body of Jones, still shaking and convulsing. “S’alright, Sarge, you’re gonna be fine. Take it easy.” Cox took a deep breath and tried to stop his own hands from shaking so violently, afraid he’d drop Jones’ head and shoulders back down into the slime that covered the floor. Cox shifted his weight and positioned his thigh underneath Jones’ shoulders, keeping the man’s head and neck clear of the ooze. “Easy, Sarge. Easy. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?” Cox frantically scanned the chamber. It was huge — far bigger than the limited glow of the headtorches had revealed. The night vision goggles allowed him to see details, but still there was something just at the edge of his peripheral vision — something that seemed to be taunting him in a sick game of Marco Polo. Wherever he looked in the chamber he could sense it…

He looked down again at Jones. “Sarge, c’mon, stay with me!” He slapped Jones’ face gently, garnering a moan in response. “Sarge, hey, Sarge…” Cox looked up — straight into the wild, staring eyes of a massive figure. “Jesus Christ!”

He scuttled backwards, ignoring the crack as Jones’ head hit the hard stone floor and propelled himself away from the figure. Gun! Gun! Grab your gun! He swung the SA80 up, and then realised that it would probably be more effective as a club. This was not a live ammo exercise. It was a ‘shit and thunder’ romp across the Wiltshire countryside, with plenty of flash-bangs, noise and piss and not much else. The SA80’s magazine was full of blanks, which made it about as much use as chucking confetti at a seven-foot tall… what?

What the actual fuck was it?

Human? Hell no, he’d never seen anyone that big. And even though it was showing up in his goggles, it seemed to have an almost ethereal quality, as if it was trying to exist in two alternative dimensions at once. Here, and as long as you were looking directly at it, the figure appeared solid. But glance at it out of the corner of your eye and it flitted in and out of phase. He also felt wave after wave of hatred coming from the thing, slamming into him like the Atlantic on spin cycle. This fucker was majorly pissed off, and it seemed majorly pissed off at Jones in particular. It loomed over the prone man, a snarl contorting what would otherwise pass as a face. Broken and rotting teeth dripped pus and drool, and the massive muscles on its arms and shoulders flexed.

Moving faster than anything that size had a right to, its right arm shot down towards Jones and taloned fingers slashed at the front of his MTP camouflage jacket, shredding it into ribbons. Jones screamed as the claws sliced into his flesh.

Cox’s scream matched Jones’, only his was one of fury at what this thing was doing to his sergeant. “No!” Cox scrabbled to his feet and fumbled for his bayonet, willing his shaking fingers to do what they were told. The bayonet clicked and locked into place. He picked up every ounce of courage he had left and charged at the creature.

He got three steps, tops.

The thing looked up, flicked a hand and Cox was sent spinning across the chamber by an invisible force and slammed into the wall. The creature’s hand stayed outstretched towards Cox, and he slowly raised it, as if it were conducting some demonic orchestra to a crescendo. As he did, Cox slid painfully up the wall, pinned to the rough stone and unable to break free. The stone slabs jarred against his vertebrae and no matter how hard he struggled, he could only watch, helpless, as the creature turned its attention back to the whimpering form of Jones…

Jones stared up into the eyes of a creature that had no fucking right to exist. Not here. Not anywhere. The thing snorted then pressed its palm against Jones’ forehead. Instantly, Jones was engulfed in a wave of flashing images bursting through his brain. The stinking piles of corpses he’d seen in that slaughterhouse; the dead child, expiring in his arms, her fingers grasping at his hand in a vain attempt to hang on to life; his mate Chris, when that IED had taken his legs off at the knees and blown the shreds of the poor bastard’s skin and muscle tissue into Jones' face. Foul, tainted images of combat in a distant land, etched into his soul and twisting like rotting fibres in his mind. He wept, crying for everything he’d suffered.

Then new images came. More savage, more horrific than he’d imagined possible. This place, filled with the screams of the dying as a circle of hazy figures chanted incessantly, calling to the darkest god of the Stones — Aeron, the Celtic god of slaughter. Images of a war waged by the real druids against the Roman Legions filled Jones’ mind. He saw them hunting Aeron in the Welsh Preseli Hills, capturing the God using trickery and guile, bringing him back here and entombing him in the bluestones that were erected at the entrance of this portal to the Underworld. Here, on the open Plains, Legionnaires were lured to their doom, tumbling into the cavern as its roof gave way and they were deposited at the feet of a starving, angry god. A god who revelled in slaughter. A god who could sense the mind of a soldier and lure him to this place, calling him with images of unimaginable savagery and a lust for power.

And now, Aeron had a soldier crawling and pissing himself in terror at his feet, and another crying and raging against his helplessness, pinned to the chamber wall like a butterfly collector’s prize possession. He felt the pulsating power throbbing through his loins and into his blackened soul. Time to feast once more.

It had been too long. Far too long…

Aeron stood over Jones, examining his victim, savouring the rising smell of fear. He reached down and, clawing his fingers, forced them through the soft, yielding skin, sinking through flesh, pushing aside the other organs. They could be spread at the feet of the stones later for the ravens to dine upon.

He ignored the screaming, the frantic and futile grabs by his victim at his wrist as his hand sunk deeper into the man’s chest. He could feel the pulsating, throbbing heart, pumping furiously, as if it knew it was about to be torn from the warm safety of the body. The screams grew weaker, interspersed by choking gurgles as blood filled the man’s throat.

His fingers closed around the pump and slowly, agonisingly slowly, he tore out Jones’ beating heart and held it up, blood dripping between his fingers, paying no attention to the pathetic, blood-frothed gurgles as his victim died in agony, twitching and convulsing.

He licked the still warm heart slowly, letting the blood and fluid coat his tongue, savouring its deliciousness. It had been so very, very long since he had tasted such fear — the fear of a warrior in the throws of his agonising, prolonged death. He took a bite and swallowed, letting the hot lump of tissue slide down his throat, the coppery taste filling his mouth, giving him strength, vigour, power.

Then he crushed what was left of the organ between his fingers, amused by the sheer fragility of the soft muscle tissue as he turned what was the most precious of all organs into useless mush.

Jones died badly, a victim of his own horrific fantasy. Aeron feasted on his flesh, tearing at his throat and moaning with pleasure as the still-warm tissue slid down his throat.

Aeron stopped mid-gorge and turned his eyes towards the terrified form of Cox and smiled lazily, blood and flesh dripping from his teeth. He stood, and strolled across the chamber towards Cox, relishing the sensation of Jones’ warm blood swirling around his feet and mingling with the juices of decay that coated the floor. He stretched out a taloned hand towards Cox’s chest, hungering for the pounding heart caged behind the man’s ribs. It called to him. It sang to him. And the screams of the doomed man made the song so much sweeter…