SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

“I stared down there like I was looking past the opened gates of Hell. And I watched as one of those poor bastards was dragged from his table and set down in a glass cage. Crowley stood right next to me, his eyes narrowed down to slits, his whole body tensed and waiting to see what would happen next. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, Eddie. I turned away from the sight of that torn and bloodied prisoner and I saw him smiling as he watched the Germans flip their damned switches and read whatever devices they had to understand for what they were doing.

“He was smiling. His mouth was stretched wide and he had the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen, I half expected the sonuvabitch to start laughing then and there. But he didn’t. His mouth was smiling, but it never reached his eyes. His eyes, they were dark brown as I recall, but they looked black as a coal mine at midnight right then.

“I looked back just as the glass chamber they’d put that man in was filled with a green gas. It wasn’t just green. It had specks of light in it, like fireflies seen in a heavy fog. Whatever it was they’d put in that little glass cage, it was enough to stop the tortured screaming I’d been hearing. The man’s body was barely revealed through the dark gas that floated in the area with him. I think part of me was happy for his silence, or maybe just relieved. Either way, it didn’t take long for me to get over that. I stopped feeling much of anything but a lump of fear in my throat when I saw his body start twitching.

“When the gas cleared—and by cleared I guess I mean when it had been absorbed into his flesh—I saw the bloodied, torn body lying flat on the ground in that little glass cage. And I saw the way he didn’t breathe anymore, and the way the eyes had rolled into the back of his head. I felt my blood ready to boil over at the very notion of that sort of torture just to kill a man. To actually peel back flesh and muscle, to bury screws in skin and leave a man in that state, only to gas him to death… I couldn’t believe it, and I whispered as much to Crowley as I started checking my rifle. I was gonna end this madness, and I was gonna kill me a few dozen Nazis in the process.

“Crowley looked over at me and for the first time since we’d entered the château, I could see the humor in his eyes as well as on his face. He leaned in really close to me, close enough that for a second I was afraid he was going to kiss me, and he whispered back. ‘I’m betting that thing down there might not be so easy to kill with a bullet, old son. I’m betting that maybe he would take a bullet from you as an insult and maybe decide to kill you for your trouble.’

“I had no idea what he was talking about, but he pointed toward the glass chamber and I looked in that direction. And all that rage I’d built up, all that anger I’d focused to help me with the idea of killing so many people… died away. I went from angry to terrified in about as long as it takes me to blink my eyes.

“The man they’d killed was standing, and he looked even less human than before. The skin on his body had turned green, a little lighter in color than the gas he’d been forced to breathe, but not by much. And his eyes, which I had seen roll back into his head until all I could see was the whites, looked around with pupils that glowed with that same firefly light I’d seen earlier. He looked around, and his mouth I’d seen screaming earlier closed with a snap like a bear trap slamming down on a deer’s hind leg.

“I stood there looking down at the thing in the chamber. It barely resembled the man they’d dragged in there minutes earlier. One of the men, the one wearing a Gestapo uniform under his lab coat, barked out orders at the thing in German. It stepped forward, leaving its cage and moving with all the precision of an honor guard presenting itself to the President of these United States. That poor, tortured soul knew how to follow orders, and it was ready to follow its new master for as long as it saw fit.

“Crowley tapped my shoulder, and when I looked at him, he winked. ‘You want the green guy, or do you want the soldiers? Your choice.’ I answered him by leveling my rifle and putting a bullet through the head of the Nazi who was barking orders.”

I barely heard my grandfather speak his next words. They were so faint I had to strain to make them out. He spoke them in a hurried whisper, a dirty confession that he had to make, but didn’t want to speak. “That was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed killing a man, Eddie. But before the night was done, I’d enjoyed the feeling over a dozen times.