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.’