James Moore - SNAFU - Hunters

I thought long and hard about what he’d said. He wasn't talking down to me, exactly, but he was simplifying and I was all right with that. I had a lot on my mind and I really couldn’t devote as much to him as I should have.

“Want to say that in plain English?”

“Son, I don’t know how much plainer I can get.” He looked my way. “Okay. Someone’s trying to summon a demon from Hell. That’s a good analogy. And that someone wants to control the demon. It isn’t going to work. Near as I can tell, the demon already got away.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because if the demon was still under whoever’s command, the damned Germans wouldn’t be looking all over the countryside trying to find it.”

“But the markings on the tank…”

“The markings are supposed to offer protection. Whoever summed the demon wants to stay safe. That’s why I’m going after the tank.”

“You can’t take on four tanks by yourself.”

“You’ve been dumb enough to stay with me, so I’m not really by myself.” He actually managed to sound amused instead of insulted.

The morning brought snowfall.

It was a wet, hard snow and even the treads from the tanks were hidden away. Despite that Crowley seemed cheery enough.

“Why are you smiling? We lost their trail.”

“Because if we have to stop, so do they. The snow’s going to slow them down, and that means we can get closer.”

“It still doesn’t mean we can do much to them.”

Crowley shook his head. “You’re still thinking about fighting them as if we were ever planning to go in with guns blazing. That’s not going to happen and it never was.”

“Well, I never said…” I let my voice fade off. He was right. That was exactly what I was thinking. It was what I was trained for.

“We’re dealing with necromancy and dark magic. That means there is no time to play fair.” Crowley looked at me for a long time, and I felt like he was sorting through whether or not to tell me things he had kept to himself. “You get to stay back here for now. I need to look over where the tanks should be and I need to decide how to handle them.”

I thought about arguing. In the end I just nodded instead.

Two minutes after he headed in the direction of the tanks – I was guessing about that, because I couldn’t have told you where they were on a bet – I followed him. I told myself I wasn't going to leave a man to fight on his own, but the truth was that he’d got my curiosity boiling and I wanted to know more than I already did about the things he was talking about.

The snow was hellish. I mean that. If I could have figured out which way was back I would have taken it. What had started as a heavy snow in the night became a full on blizzard. The sun was somewhere above me, but all I could see were thick, fat flakes of snow falling from the heavens. And trees. I normally found those before I ran into them.

The worst part, I think, was the way the snow danced. It was charming when I was at home and there was a heavy snow. But back then I knew where I was and I had the lights of the house and a hundred familiar landmarks. Here I was in the middle of the woods, possibly even a forest proper – and if you don’t know the difference, I pray you find out under better circumstances – and all I could see were the shapes the snow took on as it twisted and whirled in the currents of a wind I barely felt.

The silence was another thing. I heard no noises worth noting, save an occasional sigh of the wind.

From time to time I’d stop and try to listen for something more, but all I ever got was the low, whispered sigh and the shivers as the cold sank deeper into me.

That continued on through the day and well past the time the sun set. In the complete darkness I had no choice but to stop. I settled myself under a natural shelter, several branches that crossed over each other and left me an area of relative calm. The snow still fell and tipped and tapped the canopy above, but there was still no wind and the silence lulled me for a while.

I wrapped up as best I could and tried to think warm thoughts. I couldn’t make a decent fire, but I tried for a while before giving up.

Eventually, I slept.

When I came to I thought I’d been buried alive. I wasn't actually far off. The weight of the snow-covered branches above had crushed them lower to the ground, but as I grabbed at the first of them and rattled it back and forth a cascade of white plummeted down and the branches started to rise. Nature can provide sometimes. I’m lucky I wasn't buried under all of that snow forever. I’m lucky I didn’t freeze to death. Lucky, lucky man. Sometimes I forget how lucky I was to live through that. Not just the blizzard, though that was part of it. I mean the whole affair.

The silence was a living thing by the time I stood and shook myself off. The most impressive noises I heard were my own breaths and the sounds of snow falling in loose trickles from branches shaken by my passing.

It was World War Two in France and the Germans were everywhere. I should have known that would never last.

I had made only a quarter mile of travel at best; heading in what I believed was as a southerly direction. Crowley was, I was certain, either dead or gone. I was deep in the Nazi-ruled section of the country and I did not want to be. So I was headed south. I hoped. The problem was that the sun was hidden behind clouds too thick to let me even really guess the time of day, and after a few attempts my compass yielded nothing but a constant, slow spin of the needle, I gave up and moved on.

Have you ever walked through snow that was waist deep? I was half frozen and I was shivering but working up a hard sweat at the same time. It was all I could do and all I could think about.

Until the thunder came my way.

I knew it wasn’t real thunder, of course. It was the echoes of artillery fire blowing through the countryside and bouncing off the hills.

I stopped my forward motion and tried to decide where it was coming from. It didn’t take long. I was walking straight toward it. The ground beneath me shook and my boot soles vibrated right along with it.

The tanks were close. I couldn’t hope to know what had started them off. Maybe I was too cold to notice until they were close by. Maybe they had been stopped and had only just started moving again.

What I do know is that I heard Crowley’s voice amidst the chaos and was drawn to it. He was dangerous, I knew that, but he was familiar and I was desperate.

I can’t say I ran to his help. The snow was too deep. I did the best I could, pushing against a wall of cold and wet and trying simultaneously not to be spotted by my enemies.

The road came up abruptly. The tanks managed to force their way through or over the worst of the snow with little effort, and each tank following after made the path that much clearer.

I pushed myself until I reached the trench the tanks had cut in the snow and fell onto the road in exhaustion. My muscles shook and my breaths came hard and fast and left my sides feeling bruised.

When I got up, I looked at the path of destruction in my way and I followed it. Several of the Nazi soldiers were dead in that trail, broken and bloodied and lifeless.

Each corpse told a story that I could follow easily enough. They were behind the tanks, that much was obvious. The first few bodies I found had cut throats or broken necks. It wasn't hard for me to imagine Jonathan Crowley moving behind them in the snow and killing them one by one.

The snow still fell, you see. Despite a night of sleep and a half-day wasted in an effort to move south, the snow still fell from a dark, leaden sky and didn’t seem at all concerned with the deaths of a few Germans, but it made wonderful cover.