Screaming Eagles (The Front, Book 1) (15 page)

G
raves bounced
up and down as the half-track ripped over a pocketed road until they came into view of the city. They were approaching from the north, and there were forces of the Allies clustered around the remains of the shattered walls and bombed-out buildings. Gunfire rippled along the line, and artillery started to boom from inside Bastogne.

From the western flank came a group of the enemies that was hard to fathom. Thousands of men poured out of the woods, scrambled over foxholes, and pounded over roads. The majority of the force were not returning fire. There were no carefully-placed machine gun squads covering the men. Mortars weren’t firing back. It was simply a mass of humanity assaulting a vastly outnumbered force, much like he’d seen assaulting their tank.

“My god. Do we even want to be rescued?” Murph said from the driver seat.

Graves swung the big-mounted machine gun around and prepared to fire on the enemy.

Bullets ricocheted off the half-track, forcing Graves and Gabby to duck.

A bazooka sounded, and the explosive sailed past their vehicle.

“Murphy! Remember when I told you to bring your pack? Well get that damn flag out and wave it like it’s on fire!” Graves howled.

“If it was on fire, they’d shoot us all to death,” Murphy said.

Murph swung his pack off and dug around inside. His brother had been killed at Normandy, and he’d been carrying big American flag as a memento of his brother’s sacrifice.

He unfurled it in the whipping wind and held it aloft. Graves reached for the other side of the flag, but it flapped just out of grasp as more bullets whizzed around them.

Graves finally got his fingers around the other end, and together they lifted the flag over the top of the half-track as it raced toward the Allied line.

“We’re going to get shot,” Murph said over the roaring wind and engine.

Graves found it hard to argue. On the cold metal beneath them, the body of their tank gunner, Tom “Big Texas” LaRue lay in the cold. Murph was right: they’d likely join him, in the coming moments.

Rounds hit the half-track, and one pierced the American flag. Murph ducked, but Graves urged him back to his feet. They got up higher, stepping on the benches on either side of the half-track's interior slopped walls. The rounds stopped smacking armor.

They pulled in before a dug-in platoon of Army infantry.

It kept guns cautiously trained on Graves and his men.

Graves called down his identification, and cursed the lack of radio communications today. He’d left his notebook in the Sherman and he couldn’t remember the exact daily password. Lemon? Was it Tripoli? A harried officer who looked green greeted them. His uniform was spotless and his army jacket showed signs of little rolling around in the dirt, unlike most of his men.

“I’m Lieutenant Calhoun. Mind telling me how in the hell you men ended up in a German half-track? In fact, how do we know you’re actually Americans?”

“What else would we be, sir?” Graves said in confusion.

“Had reports of German forces fucking around behind our lines. Changing signs around and pointing divisions in the wrong directions.”

“Well, we’re not Krauts,” Graves said, and fumbled around his pockets until he found his wallet and tossed it to the officer.

The Lieutenant flipped through it and tossed it back.

“You men want to help? Park that half-track there,” he said, pointing at a break in the wall. “And keep the Krauts from getting too close.”

“You got it, sir. Shouldn’t we report in first, though?” Graves asked.

“No time. We’re about to be overrun by thousands of Germans. Even if every man fired nonstop, we’d never pick them all off before we were swarmed.”

“So why fight at all?” Murph interjected. “We should be packing it in.”

“Because it’s about to bet ugly and we’re all that’s protecting the city,” the Lieutenant said.

“Whole damn war’s ugly,” Graves said, looking at the corpse of Big Texas.

T
hey came
at the front line like a mob. Hundreds of Germans mixed with Allied soldiers stalked across the ground. An army of flesh and clothes that couldn’t remember how to use their weapons. Hundreds led the charge, but there were many thousands behind.

Officers yelled across the assembled men to pick targets carefully. Coley and his squad had been on the run for over twenty-four hours. They hadn’t slept at all, and now they were being tossed right back into the cauldron.

The German POWs were placed under guard, but the men didn’t put up a fight. They kept their mouths shut and watched with grim faces as their own forces came at the Americans.

After a slim resupply effort, they had enough rounds to assist, but there weren’t enough bullets to go around. The artillery had shifted again, and began to rain hell on the enemy, opening up huge swaths of carnage while punching fresh holes in the ground.

Bodies and debris exploded and were tossed into the air. The sound of the bombardment reminded him of how they’d been awoken yesterday. He wanted to go find a hole to hide in, and come back when this was all over.

But he was an officer in the United States Army, and this was his place. Among his men. What didn’t fit into the equation were the automatons that were attacking. They’d seen this and he’d rushed back to report that they’d been attacked by a force of Nazis just like this.

His squad gathered around him and started to pour firepower on the advancing horde.

“S’like a bunch of damn zombies, sir!” Harpham shouted over the noise.

“Like a
what
?”

“Seen this movie a couple of years ago at the cinema, called
King of the Zombies
. These guys are acting like zombies.”

“You think Hitler invested technology in voodoo mysticism and this is the result?” Coley said.

“I don’t know a damn thing about voodoo, sir, but
look
at them. Most of the soldiers don’t fight, they just walk. Mindless. Like, you know,
zombies
.”

A blast of machine gun fire made them hunker down. A GI a few feet away slumped to the dirt with a hole in his helmet, and stared at the sky.

“That looks like bullets to me, Private,” Coley said.

“No tactics. No order. They’re just imitating what they did before they got turned,” Harpham said.

Voodoo? That was crazy talk.

But there was no denying what he was seeing. There was no way to hide from this force. During his brief engagement with German soldiers, they’d shown more or less sound tactics, but this was not even organized chaos.

Coley poked his head back over the top of the hastily-dug hole and put a requisitioned M1 to his shoulder. He aimed and fired until the clip sang as it sailed into the air.

The men around them loaded, fired, and loaded again, but it had little effect on the mass of men that were coming at them.

He dug out another clip, and thought very carefully about how much ammunition he had left. They weren’t going to be able to stop army. There simply weren’t enough men, weapons, and ammo.

G
rillo
, Captain Taylor, and Shaw hit the dirt as rounds ricocheted around them. They’d managed to secure the POW, but the German was a handful. The man was strong but slow. It took the three of them to wrestle him over onto his stomach. A couple of MPs joined the effort and got the man secured before they hauled him off.

“Nice work, men,” Captain Taylor said.

Grillo sucked in deep breaths and wondered how much worse this was going to get. He peeked over the barricade and swore.

A lot worse.

There was no end to the advancing enemy. They came at the thin line and were cut down, but for every Kraut they shot, there were three to take his place. Grillo slung his M1 around and took careful aim.

He shot a pair of Germans, then shifted his aim, but there was an American soldier in his sights. He paused, unsure if he could shoot one of his own guys. Then someone did the deed for him, and the man dropped.

Shaw stated the obvious. “Jesus Christ. There’s too many of them!”

With the assistance of villagers, some of the Americans had started to build fortifications behind them, next to the low walls and buildings of the town.

Everything that could work as a barricade was added to the task. They dragged out dressers, tables, chairs, sections of fence, and chunks of buildings. The wall took shape, but there wasn’t enough manpower to create a barricade long enough to hold this force back.

Grillo fired until his gun ran empty, then dug out his last clip. He reloaded, and picked his targets more carefully.

Only twenty yards separated the men from the Krauts.

He heard a scream to his left, and hazarded a look: a forward foxhole filled with GIs--all of whom were packing it up to fall back--came under direct attack. A soldier dressed in white ran toward them, shrugging off several shots.

He fell onto the men and went after them with his hands and a knife. One of the American soldiers shot him in the head, but it was too late. A force of a dozen or more descended on the emplacement and overwhelmed them.

One of the GIs got free and ran.

The rest screamed and fought, but it appeared to be too late for them.

An officer ran from behind the barricade and yelled “Fall back!”

Grillo didn’t need to be told twice. He rose to his feet and with Shaw and Captain Taylor on either side, made for the city.

G
raves
and his men dug out ammo cases from the back of the German half-track. They found a box of potato mashers and put it on the edge of the vehicle. GIs snatched them up and turned the explosives against the men who’d planned to carry them into battle against the Allies.

When they’d arrived, a couple of soldiers had placed Big Texas’s body on a stretcher and carried him away to join rows of others who lay next to the remains of an aid station. Cold lumps under the blankets and snow. Graves and his men didn’t have time to offer a proper goodbye. The battle was already under way.

Explosions ripped holes in the lines, but it was too little to stop the force.

The unmistakable sound of tanks came from the direction of the city. He turned and grinned as a pair of Shermans rolled onto the battlefield.

The vehicles tore across the ground and right into a group of Germans, then kept on going. The two machine gunners worked the front guns while a tank commander sticking out of their hatches laid into the Krauts with the .50 cal.

“Wish we were in one of those tanks. I’d do some serious ass-kicking and then hightail it back to the front,” Murph said.

“This
is
the front,” Graves observed.

“Ain’t no front like I ever seen,” Murph said.

Gabby worked on the Kraut machine gun mounted on the half-track until he figured it out, then fed it ammo. He opened up and ripped a forward line of Germans to shreds. The gun jammed, so he fought it with curses and then got it firing again.

“We’re falling back,” someone yelled.

Graves and Murph took one look at each other.

“Get us rolling, Gabby, Murph you’re back on the machine gun. And leave that American flag draped over the front so no one mistakes us,” Graves ordered.

“You got it. No sense in giving up a fine military machine like this beast,” Gabby said, and slapped the top.

The half-track backed up, then followed the Americans retreating back to the city.

T
he fighting wore
on throughout the day. Piles and piles of enemy bodies made obstacles for the oncoming force, but it barely slowed down the relentless army.

Grillo was relieved when the word came to continue falling back into the city. Villages joined the fight, using whatever weapons they could get their hands on: kitchen knives, shovels, and one burly Belgian swung a sledgehammer left and right as he covered a score of retreating women and children.

He put up a fight, but was eventually taken to the ground. The people he’d been covering ran, but some of them weren’t able to get away.

Grillo and his men fired until they were out of ammo, but it was too late for the women and children. He fought back tears as he was ordered to withdraw. He came across a GI who’d been ripped apart and took the man’s Thompson and his ammo. His new M1 was out of ammo so he left it next to the corpse.

As he dug out a pair of magazines and one grenade, the guy reached for him. The presumably dead GI's eyes had turned white, and he made a low, keening noise that hissed through his shattered throat. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and turned Grillo’s stomach upside down.

When he’d recovered from vomiting, Pierce and Shaw grabbed his arms and urged him on. Pierce had been limping along, aiding when he could, but his leg was clearly paining him.

Captain Taylor had been conferring with command when he found the remains of Able and Baker companies.

“Grillo. Is it true you’re a combat engineer?”

“Yes sir,” Grillo said. “Orders got fouled up on my way to Europe.”

“Perfect. We need you. As soon as we secure a ride, we’re planning a surprise for the Krauts.”

“Kinda surprise, sir?” Sergeant Pierce asked.

“Wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now, would it? Okay, Corporal Grillo. You’re with me,” Taylor said.

“I’m a Private, sir.”

“Not any more. Field promotion. Congratulations,” Captain Taylor said, then sauntered off.

Grillo fought a smile and followed, but not before he wiped the vomit off his mouth.