Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

The two men looked around the chamber. “Bunker, huh? So they used stone slabs to line their bunkers during the Cold War then, did they?” Cox pressed a hand into the small of his back and arched his body. “Shit, Sarge. I thought dropping on you I’d have a bit of a cushion. But you’re knobblier than a sackful of rocks!” He flexed again. “I think I’ve cracked a rib!”

“Jesus H Christ, will you please give your damn mouth a rest for two seconds!” Jones stared at the walls, puzzled. This was no Cold War concrete bunker. For starters, it was circular. And huge. And as Cox had so ably pointed out, it was also lined with stone.

Jones stood and dusted himself off. As his eyes adjusted to a different kind of darkness, he could see that the chamber they had so unceremoniously landed in was huge. And it stank. Dear God, it stank! A vile odour you could practically chew. It made the air feel thick and suffocating, like being smothered by a rancid blanket. The curved ceiling of the chamber was lost in an ocean of thick, black shadows that made it feel oppressive and much lower than it actually was. In the middle of the inky blackness was a slightly lighter patch — the break in the ground they’d tumbled through. The gap was framed by whiskers of silhouetted grass stems, and Jones could make out a few distant stars twinkling above. Gronking to itself, a raven flapped lazily across the night sky, its guttural calls echoing around the landscape.

Not a bunker, then. Something older. A tomb, perhaps? One of the barrows that littered the landscape? There were plenty of them, most of which had been excavated by archaeologists over the years. Was this one of the hundreds that had already been documented across the south of England, dating back to a darker, more savage and bloody era? Or was it a previously undiscovered one, secreted away for thousands of years?

Jones sniffed, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The smell in here was truly god-awful, like someone had left a whole box full of dead rats out in the sun. “Right then. We’re stuck in a shitty old tomb that smells worse than your mother’s fanny. If we were archaeologists, I guess we’d just about be pissing our pants with excitement right about now. But seeing as we’re serving soldiers in Her Mage’s army, it’s now our duty to get out of here in one piece and report this as a hazard. This fucker’s big enough to swallow a grunt crusher whole, and that roof couldn’t support our weight, let alone sixty-two tons of Challenger Two.” Jones looked up to the gap in the roof. “Bollocks. Even standing on my shoulders, you’re not gonna reach that.”

“Sarge, the entire US basketball team standing on each other’s shoulders couldn’t reach that!” Cox’s voice sounded strained. “Try radioing for help.”

Jones pulled his comms out of its holder and depressed the squawk button. Nothing.

Jones tried the radio three more times, battling to suppress a rising sense of panic. He didn’t like this dark, enclosed space, even if it was the size of a cathedral. He balled his hands into fists, trying to disguise the tremor that shook his normally steady fingers.

Jones pulled out his mobile phone. “No bars.” Shit. Shit, shit, shit ! He jammed the phone back into his pocket. So they had no comms, no way up to the surface, and nobody knew where they were. And… seriously, what the hell was that smell? “Cox, have you shat yourself or something?” Jones switched to breathing through his mouth.

“Fuck off!” Cox’s voice was sounding more panicked by the second.

Jones sniffed again and almost threw up. The smell was getting stronger… and now he recognised it for what it was. It was the same stench that had hit him like a wall when he’d walked into that Taliban slaughterhouse in Helmund. It was the smell of decomposing flesh, body fluids and putrefaction. “Jesus!” He gagged and put a hand over his mouth. It was coming in waves now, and it was worse every time they moved. “Stand still, Cox.”

“Why?”

“Just stand still!” Jones aimed his headtorch at the floor and nearly vomited on the spot. In the bright, white spotlight he could see the entire floor was slick and covered in slime. It had a marbled appearance, with swirls of darker patches in a larger expanse of paler fluids. He crouched and touched a gloved finger to the floor. As he brought his hand back up, a strand of jelly-like goo stuck to his glove, the viscosity the same as baby snot. He stood and flicked the disgusting stuff off his glove. He knew exactly what the slime was. And it wasn’t baby snot, that was for damn sure.

“Sarge…”

“Easy, Cox. Easy.” Jones could now hear genuine fear in Cox’s voice. Not so cocky now, are you, you smart-mouthed little shit? he thought viciously. But the newbie was under his protection, despite his earlier and deeply disturbing mental image of ripping the son of a bitch’s heart out of his chest. His job now was to get them out of here, and quickly.

Jones stood in the middle of the chamber, directly underneath the hole that led to the outside world — a world where the floor wasn’t coated with the rotting remains of decaying bodies. A world where the darkness didn’t press in on you like a vice. A world where horrific thoughts of disembowelling your fellow man could be dismissed as a sick by-product of PTSD, and talked through with a shrink over a nice cuppa and a biscuit. In here, in the womb of the earth and so close to the ritualistic carnage that had saturated this landscape in blood for centuries, the familiar form of an SA80 didn’t seem to be such a comfort.

Jones tried to quell the panic he felt was about to hit him like a tsunami. He scanned the chamber, and the spotlight of his torch revealed a stone-lined wall so well made you wouldn’t be able to get a blade between the unevenly shaped slabs, let alone your fingertips. As he did a three-sixty rotation, the torch beam landed on a much larger lump of stone and he stopped in his tracks. Carefully, in case the slime caused him to lose his footing, he made his way over to the massive stone.

“Sarge, for fuck’s sake, talk to me!” Cox’s panic was now clearly audible.

“Stop panicking, fella. We’re not dead yet. So calm down and breathe slowly. Preferably through your mouth. If you’re gonna throw up, do it in a corner. Somewhere I’m not going to step in it.” He ignored the sounds of Cox dashing to the side of the void and throwing his guts up, focusing only on the massive megalith in front of him. “We must be right next to the Henge. This looks like the arse-end of one of the Sarsen Stones.”

“How’s that possible?” Cox spat the last remnants of bile from his mouth and straightened, feeling slightly better for voiding ration pack number sixteen out of his twisted guts.

“What, you think the bloody things levitate, you daft sod? They’re buried into the ground, how do you think they stay up? There are legends about underground chambers beneath the Stones, but shit, I thought it was just a bunch of new age bollocks…”

Jones slowly reached out his hand and brushed his fingertips over the surface of the stone.

The jolt threw him backwards clear across the chamber.

He landed and slid through the slime on his arse, trying to stop himself from slamming into the opposite wall. His headtorch went spinning across the floor, the light dancing and contorting like a ballerina on acid. It smashed into the side of the chamber, then blinked out. Jones finally came to rest a few inches from the wall, feeling like he’d just been hit with the mother of all tasers. He gasped, unable to get a lungful of the putrid air. Jones felt Cox cradling his head and heard the panicked man’s voice at the edge of hearing, but couldn’t respond. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and a million ants were crawling all over his body. He shook violently, his muscles convulsing and twitching as he tried to focus on bringing his breathing under control.