SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

The survivors had begun the awful task of collecting the bodies of the dead, carrying them from the nave and putting them inside the sacristy where Nils and Cade had met earlier. Cade pulled Nils aside and explained what they’d found in the downstairs.

“A tunnel?” Nils said, when he heard what had been hidden behind the stack of furniture. “Father Giesler used to talk of a secret passage that had been used to smuggle out Jews during the war, but I’d always thought he was just making it up.”

“The tunnel exists, there’s no doubt about that. And the demons used it to gain access to the church, though how they got that iron door open still remains to be seen.”

“Oh, I think I can help with that,” Nils said, and led Cade across the room to a sheet-covered body lying behind a nearby row of pews. Nils bent and pulled back the sheet – which Cade saw was really an altar cloth – and exposed the corpse lying beneath it.

Cade recognized the dead man as one of those who had wielded one of the homemade flame throwers earlier that evening. He’d never been directly introduced so he didn’t know the man’s name, but he rarely forgot a face.

Which was a good thing as the man’s face was about the only part of him that was still recognizable. The rest of the man’s body was frozen in the midst of metamorphosis; he must have been undergoing a protean phase-shift when the bullet that killed him had found its home in the center of his forehead. Cade squatted beside the corpse and looked it over carefully. The man’s limbs had stretched a good foot longer than normal, giving him a decidedly unbalanced appearance. He’d also grown a covering of rubbery flesh that looked more like the hide of a seal than the skin of a human being. Nubs of bone – possibly the beginnings of horns? – were jutting out through rips in his shirt along the top of his shoulders and others could be seen along both sides of his torso. Cade couldn’t see below the man’s waist – the cloth covered that part of his body – but he had no doubt that he’d find the same thing were he to expose the rest of the man’s corpse.

The man had clearly been ‘infected’ by one of the demons; the question was when.

Cade glanced up at Nils.

“How did this happen?”

A shake of the head. “His name is... was... Stefan Braun. He was a halfway-decent mechanic at the auto body shop here in town and one of the men who helped this afternoon. You know, with the flame-throwers.”

Cade nodded.

Nils went on. “He seemed to withdraw after our excursion, but he didn’t seem hurt or anything. Just tired, you know? One of the women said she saw someone go down into the basement about half-an-hour before the attack and thinks it was him, but admits that she was half-asleep and could be wrong.”

Cade didn’t think she was, though. The drones they’d been dealing with all night didn’t have the spiritual power necessary to cross that threshold uninvited, so someone had to have opened the door to the tunnel in the basement and invited the hellspawn into the church. If Braun had been injured when he’d come out with Nils to rescue Echo, he might have fallen under the demon’s influence without anyone knowing about it. A Judas in their midst. Then, when everyone else was sleeping, or at least when he thought they were sleeping, he made his way down into the basement and opened up the door, letting the demons inside.

Cade explained as much to Nils.

To say the priest was horrified would have been an understatement.

“I led this man out there to try and rescue you and your teammates,” Nils said, the anguish on his face quite evident to Cade. “I told him it would be all right; that we had the firepower to defeat the creatures. Now you’re telling me that I’m responsible for turning him into... that? And as a result he let those things in here?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Nils. Braun could have spoken up; he could have told us he’d been injured. There might have been something we could have done for him at that point, but not later, not once the demon had taken control. And once that happened, not even Braun could be blamed for his actions, never mind you.”

Nils wasn’t convinced, but Cade didn’t have time to waste on his feelings at the moment. Braun hadn’t been dead long, so there was still a chance Cade could get some useful information out of him. But to do so he needed to act quickly, which meant keeping Nils occupied...

“Either way, there’s nothing you can do for Braun now. But the same can’t be said of the rest of your flock. They must be terrified after all this. Why don’t you go do what you can to reassure them, check to be sure no one else has sustained any injuries we don’t know about, and then pray with them? My men and I can handle this,” Cade said.

Nils stared at him blankly for a moment, then blinked and seemed to come back to himself. “Yes. You’re right. Pray with them. Of course.”