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?