I felt the cold. I felt the pain in my arm from where a bone shard had broken skin and where the wound was likely already starting to fester.
I nearly wept. Every pain, every discomfort, was a blessing after only a few moments of absolute numbness.
I was so happy I almost missed the thing coming for me.
I need to make this clear. I’m older now and I’ve lost a lot of my mass, but back then I was over six feet tall and I weighed in at a solid hundred and seventy pounds, if you added in all supplies I was carrying. That red nightmare was tall and skinny and if it weighed in at more than a hundred and twenty-five, then I will eat my hat.
It grabbed me by my arm. I felt the wound that Januski had patched up tear open under the pressure. I swear to you now, I felt the disease spill into that wound through my jacket, my shirt and my bandages.
And then it threw me. I said before that Crowley got thrown. I did too and I think I went further. I saw the tanks go by while I was tumbling through the air and screaming my fool head off.
I hit the snow hard and fast and sank into it. To this day I don’t know what I hit. I just know it broke my arm in three places.
I have to guess I screamed. I don’t clearly recall.
I got up. I don’t know how, except that maybe it was adrenaline. I looked toward the area I’d come from and had no idea how I could have gone that far and lived. I know I was in shock. I also know the pain that was howling through my arm and my body probably helped keep me going.
I looked for Crowley, and I found him.
I can’t say if the damage I saw was done by me or by something else, but the tanks were in horrible shape. The damage to a couple of them was definitely my doing. The other two? I don’t believe so. The very first tank, the lead vehicle, it was on its side and billowing black smoke from every conceivable opening. The treads were broken, the underbelly of the thing bled oil and fuel and even as I watched it caught ablaze. I expected an explosion, but instead it just burned and the people inside of it screamed.
They screamed and I shivered.
The tank that Crowley had started for in the first place was a different case. It was still intact, but the hatch at the top was open and while I could not see what was inside the vessel, I could see odd lights. The sort of lights I had never seen inside a tank before, flickering and offering colors from every possible part of the spectrum.
In front of that I saw Crowley arguing with a man in a black SS uniform. The man held an ancient knife. I have to guess that it was ancient, because the blade was made form some sort of black stone and the handle was covered in old, cracked leather and dangled several more stone trinkets under it.
Crowley stared at that blade like it was a cross and he was a vampire. He didn’t seem capable of looking at it for long without flinching. A man I had seen charge across a half a football field’s distance in a hail of bullets. A man I had seen take on a monster made of rotting bodies and headstones and worse things. He looked at that knife with genuine fear in his eyes. And he looked at the man holding the knife with hatred. I would not want to face Crowley under the best of circumstances, but the anger he aimed at the Nazi should have burned him to the ground.
The Nazi was a thin man, even more gaunt than Crowley. He was pale and his skin was sweating. It was snowing. The air that came from my mouth with every breath was a fog, but the man was sweating. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and I had to think he was sick, like pneumonia sick.
As if to make my point, he coughed and then doubled over in a coughing fit. The only part of him that didn’t move was the hand holding that knife out like it was a ward to fend off Crowley.
Crowley didn’t move on him.
I did. I’d like to say I ran across the field and tackled the sick bastard that had killed those poor souls back at the inn, but the truth was I started slogging his way and cursing the lack of any real weapons on my body.
Not that there were many I could have used. My arm throbbed with every heartbeat and I had to take in hard, deep breaths to keep moving.
The good news was that the man in black kept trying to cough out his lungs.
Crowley looked at the man and seemed intent on trying to reach him, but he never moved forward. He just glared.
No gun, no knife. Not even a rock. I only had one arm to use, so I just pushed through the snow until I finally flopped onto the road I did my best to catch myself with my one decent arm, but the other one, the useless one, flapped around a bit, and every movement made me want to vomit or pass out or both.
I couldn’t tell you how I managed to get to my feet. All I know is that I went for the SS officer and I slammed into him with all my mass. He was thin and feverish and coughing his fool head off until he was almost purple in the face and his eyes were bulging.
I wouldn’t say I hit him all that hard, but it was enough. Down he went into the snow near the last remaining tank and he let go of his knife to catch himself. He let out a scream and coughed again and I reached down with my one good hand and grabbed his little knife and held it in my hand.
And while he was still coughing, I backed up.
And then Crowley smiled again.
By the time I’d made ten paces back, Crowley was on him. He hauled the coughing man off the ground by his jacket and screamed questions at him in German.
The man laughed and coughed at the same time, shaking his head. I don’t think he could respond in any other way. I thought then and I think now that he was already dying from whatever sickness he’d taken into his body.
Crowley might well have shaken the wreck to death, but then the red thing came back.
It looked the same. It was red and wet and furious. It didn’t even seem to notice me when it came charging through the snow, leaving red footprints as it moved.
Crowley stood his ground. He reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a handful of black powder. I don’t know what he said or what he did, but when he opened his hand the dust moved against the wind and swirled into a stream that slapped the red thing in the face like a swarm of bees. It fell back into the snow and screeched. My ears throbbed from the sound.
The skin on the red thing burned. It blackened and smoldered and I watched the black patch grow, moving over the body as it rolled and hissed and shrieked in agony. The eyes of the thing blackened and it fell onto all fours before grabbing at the snow and trying to wash away whatever Crowley had done.
And then it jumped for the tank.
Crowley had been grinning before that, but he changed his mind when it started moving into the tank itself.
It did not climb the side of the tank and move through the open hatch. It dove for the metal and flowed into it like a man diving into water. The steel sloshed and buckled around it before becoming what it had been before.
“Damn it, no!” Crowley ran for the tank.
The tank squealed as loudly as the demon had and started collapsing in on itself. The metal crunched and screamed and bent, and the thing that had moved into it took it over.
That’s the only way I can say it. The thing I’d seen earlier was pulled from the graveyard and it seemed like this was a similar notion. The Panzer didn’t quite melt. It didn’t grow hot or fall apart and rebuild itself into something else like the cars in that Transformer movie. It just sort of pulled itself together into a new shape.
I watched it with a slack jaw. I couldn’t quite accept it. Or maybe shock was finally getting the better of me.
The German coughed and laughed and said something in his own tongue that I couldn’t understand. He looked worse than before, but he was smiling.
Crowley stopped short as the tank stood up on two legs. There was no symmetry to the outside of the thing. It looked nothing like the red monster I’d seen before.