SNAFU: Hunters

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.

I need to make this clear. I’m older now and I’ve lost a lot of my mass, but back then I was over six feet tall and I weighed in at a solid hundred and seventy pounds, if you added in all supplies I was carrying. That red nightmare was tall and skinny and if it weighed in at more than a hundred and twenty-five, then I will eat my hat.

It grabbed me by my arm. I felt the wound that Januski had patched up tear open under the pressure. I swear to you now, I felt the disease spill into that wound through my jacket, my shirt and my bandages.