Von Boeselager was visibly shaken by what he could see. ‘It was enough of a battle to get up here,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine how we will ever get out again.’
‘Yep,’ Escobedo said, sitting in a corner and drawing his legs to his chest to block out the cold as he cleaned his knife, ‘that’s about the short and the tall of it.’
‘Why d’you think we’re perched up here like this?’ Johnson added. ‘If we coulda gone, we woulda gone.’
Coley looked down into the town square from which he and von Boeselager had just made their desperate escape. The amount of dead flesh down there appeared endless, and with the rest of Bastogne all but abandoned, there was nothing else left to distract the infernal army. They weren’t going anywhere fast. ‘It’s like hell on Earth,’ he said under his breath.
‘That it is, that it is,’ Parker agreed. ‘I’d like to say you get used to looking at it after a while, but that’d be a lie. You don’t. I figure things like this we’ll carry to the grave. We’ve been stuck up here a couple days now and, tell you the truth, I’ve pretty much stopped my men from looking out. See, the deeper you look, the worse it gets.’ He put a hand on Coley’s shoulder and pointed down. ‘See what I’m saying? Those two down there, they’re nothing more than children.’
Coley quickly spotted the two dishevelled creatures he’d been pointing out. Small and blood-stained, they’d clearly failed to escape the fighting which had consumed their town.
‘Man, the little ones creep me out,’ Escobedo said from down on the floor. ‘Ain’t no difference between them and the krauts out there.’
‘He’s not wrong,’ agreed Gunderson. ‘Don’t matter how big or small they are, kid or no kid, find yourself facing one of those damn things and you need to move fast. They’ll rip your heart out soon as look at you.’
‘There’s thousands of them,’ Coley said. The scale of the undead army had been apparent from down at ground level, but being up here added a whole new sense of perspective. A sense of perspective he decided he could have well done without.
‘And our boys too,’ Parker continued, pointing into another part of the crowd where a pack of figures milled in tattered and dust-covered, yet instantly recognisable uniforms. ‘Our boys fighting alongside kids and Nazis. I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘You must put your preconceptions and prejudices to one side,’ von Boeselager said. ‘These creatures are on no one’s side but their own. Men, women, Americans, Germans, British, young, old… once the effects of the serum have been passed onto them, there is no hope. We are all standing at the very gates of hell. All of us.’
3
When Lieutenant Robert Wilkins came around, he was hanging upside-down from a tree. He remembered the drop from the plane – him and many other scouts bundled out of the back of a Dakota in the midst of a massive supply drop, using the falling ammo and other supplies as cover. He remembered his parachute opening, and the rush of air as the rapid descent was arrested. He remembered the wind and the snow and the uneasy panic of being blown wildly off-course and left hanging prone in the air with all hell unfolding on the ground far below him… and then the memories stopped. He was now hanging by his knees over a branch, head down and legs up, blood rushing in the wrong direction. He recalled a viciously swirling gust. A sudden blizzard. Ice pricking his skin like someone was hammering in nails…
Got to move.
It was still snowing, and the uncomfortable angle at which he’d come to rest in the tree made it difficult to move. He considered dropping down, but it was hard to accurately estimate how far it was to fall. The white blanket covering the ground appeared deceptively soft and inviting, but Wilkins knew he couldn’t afford to take any risks. Chances were it wouldn’t have been anywhere near thick enough to cushion his fall, and there could have been anything beneath the pristine virgin snow: tree roots, a chasm, rocks… anything. He couldn’t risk it. He knew the importance of his mission. He knew how much was riding on the success of him and others.
Getting down safely was going to take some skill, and right now Wilkins felt anything but skilful. This time yesterday, he thought, I was back in Blighty with Jocelyn. He knew he’d so far been fortunate in comparison to so many other people, particularly those here in mainland Europe, but that didn’t make the pain of being away from his love any easier to stand.
Wilkins carefully anchored his legs around the thick bough to make sure he didn’t fall, then began to swing gently from his hips, weighed down by his pack but hoping to build up enough forward momentum to grab another branch and use it to haul himself upright. The bark dug into the backs of his knees, the discomfort increasing with each upward movement and backwards swing. Arms outstretched, his fingertips brushed against another branch, and then he swung harder again, not knowing how much longer he could keep this up for.
Contact.
He caught hold of the branch with his left hand and held on for all he was worth, stretching his body as far as he could – almost too far – to grab hold with his right. He moved hand over hand to manoeuvre himself closer to the trunk of the tree, then used the trunk to guide himself upright and secure his position.
The biting cold was unbearable, and he felt uncomfortably precarious up here like this. Wilkins wrapped his arms around the tree trunk and hugged it like a long lost friend. Shaking with cold, he clung on for dear life.
Alone in the backwoods of war-torn Belgium in the middle of winter. The dead of night. The sounds of fighting nearby. He was hard pushed to think of a more wretched place to be, and yet it was better to be up here than down there. If his parachute wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the trail of footprints he’d inevitably leave in the snow as he ran for cover would lead the enemy straight to him.
Whoever the enemy was.
He’d heard things during the mission briefing which had seemed more at home in that Frankenstein versus the Wolfman picture he’d caught last year than in the reality of modern warfare. Dead soldiers walking. Fighting. It was like something out of the ghost story books his mother had forbade him from reading in his formative years. For now, however, he tried to put all thoughts of ghouls and monsters from his head and focus on staying out of sight and alive.
Wilkins slowly stood up again and rebalanced himself on the bough. There was a more sturdy-looking branch just above and to his left, and despite his aching bones, with considerable effort he managed to haul himself up and wedge himself into a relatively safe place. He took the slack from the parachute cords and tied himself into position.
Sleep was fleeting and light. The noises of the forest kept him awake – birds and animals, the wind and snow, a stream trickling somewhere in the nearby vicinity (which left him with an almost unbearable urge to relive himself from his branch). And in those few moments when the natural noise subsided, other sounds took their place. The rumble and thump of distant explosions. More planes. Gunfire. Cries for help…
It never stopped. The fighting never bloody well stopped.
Shortly before six, still a couple of hours before sunrise, Wilkins heard something different. It sounded like footsteps, though they were slow and laboured, like those of a wounded animal. Perhaps it was one of his colleagues, he wondered, who’d been less fortunate in their landing than he? Wilkins remained perfectly still on his windswept perch, moving only his eyes to try and see through the miserable shadows of the pre-dawn gloom.