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.