James Moore - SNAFU - Hunters

I turned toward the tanks. I had taken on a mission to help Jonathan Crowley fight the bastard that had sacrificed people in the middle of nowhere, France. I intended to see it through.

In the distance I could hear the rumble of the tank engines, gunshots, screams. I could just make out the tanks through the shroud of snow. Much closer, I saw the red figure I’d seen before.

It was a thin shape. I cannot say if it was male or female. Despite standing on two legs the shape was too far removed from anything I could easily recognize. A long ribcage, broad shoulders muscled with thin, sinewy strands. The face was something between a skull and a horse, and had a thick head of hair that was darker but no less red.

It looked at me for a moment and then it came for me, moving over the snow, barely touching the frozen surface. It hissed at me as it came, and it reached out with one long-fingered hand that seemed to have too many joints on each finger.

I didn’t try to escape. I was too busy being horrified.

Everything about the beast was red, from its long-toed feet to its eyes, to its straggly hair.

That had draped over its face as I started to pull back.

After that all I saw was red.

Jenny was next to me in the meadow.

It was that perfect type of summer day, when the wind blew softly and washed away the possibility of sweat. Before I left for the war she and I parked ourselves under a big old oak on the family property and we had a picnic. When it was done we talked about how we would be together when it was over, how it was necessary to fight against the kinds of savages that would attack our shores, how much we would miss each other. The list was endless.

While we talked we wound up laying together under that tree. She was nestled against me and resting her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t see her face, but I could smell her sweet scent and I could feel a few wisps of her hair tickling along my jaw line and nose. I knew then I’d marry her.

It was like that again, only sweeter this time. She was comfortable and so was I. I wanted it to last forever.

So of course, it only lasted a few seconds. But I remember it so clearly, so intensively, that even after all of these years it felt more real than all the time I spent in the war.

I was lying somewhere. Jenny was gone and so was the homestead. It was a forest, but it didn’t seem like the same one I’d been walking in and freezing my ass off in.

The trees around me were vast things, massive in a way I had never seen before. The ground beneath me was a soft, thick loam. Far above, almost lost in the thickness of the forest, I could see a blue slash of sky.

As I looked around I noticed two things at the same time. First, the red thing I’d seen before was there in front of me, perched on a fallen tree that had long since begun to rot away. Second, I was dressed in my birthday suit and nothing more.

I pushed myself backward across the ground, my bare feet digging deep and shoving my body away from the thing.

It was wet with red; it dropped the stuff from its eyes and even from the pores of its skin. The air around that beast fairly seethed with disease. Just looking at it made me feel like I was sucking in every kind of hellish infection that ever existed.

As I backpedalled, it jumped down from its perch and came for me, low to the ground, almost like a hunting dog, those red, wet eyes bleeding hatred.

“Why are you not mine?” I did not see that mouth move, I saw the heavy teeth, some fangs and some flat like a horse’s, but I saw no lips to move and still the words filled me.

“I-What?” The words made no sense.

“All that I touch is mine to shape as a sculptor shapes clay and yet you are not changed. You do not obey me. Why?”

“What the hell are you?”

It swatted away my question like a man dismisses a pesky fly.

“Answer me! Why are you not mine?”

I looked around as quickly as I could. It was a quandary: I really wanted my weapons and my clothes but I didn’t dare look away from the bleeding thing coming at me.

“I don’t know!”

In my searches I realized two things: I wore no bandages but I was not injured, and I felt no pain. Actually, I felt nothing. Not an ache from sore muscles, no hunger, no thirst, not even the mulch and leaves shoved up against me as I backed away from the thing. I might have been a bit worried about that, but something with too many teeth was already coming at me and that sort of took all the worries away from the rest of my problems.

It didn’t touch me. Instead it moved closer and loomed over me. Andrew Cartwright used to loom over me when I was in third grade and he was in sixth. I was very adept at knowing what looming felt like. The menace was real, but it didn’t actually touch me.

Bits of rotted meat clung to those teeth. What I could only guess was dried blood mingled with the coarse hair falling from the thing’s head, and matted fur to the chest of the beast, but even from only a few feet away I smelled nothing.

“What did you do to me?” Anger surged inside of me, not quite burning away the cold fear, but definitely drawing my attention to the thing coming for me. How could I live a proper life if I couldn’t feel? Couldn’t taste?

The red thing moved closer, loomed over me and roared. I heard it. I felt it. Whatever it was doing, it had the upper hand.

“You are not here! You are still in the snow, freezing. You will die if you do not answer my questions! I will leave you there, to freeze!”

“I don’t know!” Fear aside, I was still angry and I roared my counterargument right back at him.

“What the hell are you? Why are you working with the Germans?”

The whole damned shape shuddered and jumped and shook with anger and it reached for me again, but this time it stopped maybe an inch from my face and I saw the claws of the thing scrape the air. I could see the way the pressure of contact with that air made the thick claws on those fingers bend instead of letting them touch me and I understood.

I don’t know how he did it. I didn’t begin to know why, but somewhere along the way Jonathan Crowley must have done something to me. I have always been a church-going man, but never been all that faithful and seeing what I had in the war already guaranteed I would never think much of God again. How could I? How could anyone be in a world where oceans were buried under the corpses of friends and enemies alike?

I didn’t think it was my faith that saved me. I thought then, and I know now that it was Crowley. He had managed somewhere along the way to stop the monster screaming at me from touching me.

And that knowledge made me smile as broadly as he did when he faced a new threat.

“You can’t touch me, can you?” I made myself stand and the thing glared at me and hissed.

I reached out to see if I could touch the beast and it stepped back, those red eyes rolling in the sunken sockets that surrounded them. There was no way I could read what that thing was thinking. It was too inhuman. But I could guess that it was furious.

“You can’t touch me. You can’t hurt me.” I stepped toward it again and I drove the flat of my hand into the beast’s torso and pushed with all my might.

I felt like I drove my hand into boiling oil, but the creature screamed as loudly as I did and then I fell back and landed in the bitter cold of the snowdrift.

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.