SNAFU: Hunters

It looked the same. It was red and wet and furious. It didn’t even seem to notice me when it came charging through the snow, leaving red footprints as it moved.

Crowley stood his ground. He reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a handful of black powder. I don’t know what he said or what he did, but when he opened his hand the dust moved against the wind and swirled into a stream that slapped the red thing in the face like a swarm of bees.  It fell back into the snow and screeched. My ears throbbed from the sound.

The skin on the red thing burned. It blackened and smoldered and I watched the black patch grow, moving over the body as it rolled and hissed and shrieked in agony. The eyes of the thing blackened and it fell onto all fours before grabbing at the snow and trying to wash away whatever Crowley had done.

And then it jumped for the tank.

Crowley had been grinning before that, but he changed his mind when it started moving into the tank itself.

It did not climb the side of the tank and move through the open hatch. It dove for the metal and flowed into it like a man diving into water. The steel sloshed and buckled around it before becoming what it had been before.

“Damn it, no!” Crowley ran for the tank.

The tank squealed as loudly as the demon had and started collapsing in on itself. The metal crunched and screamed and bent, and the thing that had moved into it took it over.

That’s the only way I can say it. The thing I’d seen earlier was pulled from the graveyard and it seemed like this was a similar notion. The Panzer didn’t quite melt. It didn’t grow hot or fall apart and rebuild itself into something else like the cars in that Transformer movie. It just sort of pulled itself together into a new shape.

I watched it with a slack jaw. I couldn’t quite accept it. Or maybe shock was finally getting the better of me.

The German coughed and laughed and said something in his own tongue that I couldn’t understand. He looked worse than before, but he was smiling.

Crowley stopped short as the tank stood up on two legs. There was no symmetry to the outside of the thing. It looked nothing like the red monster I’d seen before.

This thin was metal, and it was as lumpy and unfinished as the grave golem had been. There was a head. There was a rudimentary face. There were tank treads wrapped into the arms and head and chest of the monster. Gears that had been squashed like pumpkins were pressed into the thing. The arms didn’t end in hands, but in clubs of more twisted metal.

It tried to hit Crowley. Like any sensible man, he tried to get the hell away from it. When that fist hit the snowy ground, the earth shook. I mean that. I remember when I was a kid there was a farm hand that was heavy enough you could almost feel a tremor when he walked past in a hurry. His name was Earl and he died of a massive heart attack while he was trying to get an old generator to work again.

I didn’t think maybe the ground shook. I saw the snow ripple away from where the monster hit and I saw Crowley lose his balance and scramble back to his feet as the thing came for him.

The German said something else, his voice hoarse and crackling from whatever was broken inside of him. I looked away from the fight for a second and stared at that smiling face, and I lost my temper. Two steps brought me close enough to raise my heel over that bastard’s head and to stomp down with all I had in me. He stopped laughing and his temple got a dent in it.

I don’t know what to say about Crowley. I guess part of me doesn’t think he was human. All I know was he took a punch from that thing. He blocked it with his arm and instead of being crushed into a pulp, he actually deflected the blow. He got knocked back a dozen feet, and he landed on his backside again, but he took that blow and wasn’t crushed. Hell, I’d stomped on the Nazi’s head and likely killed him, and by all rights Crowley should have died when he caught that punch.

He got right back up, that smile of his wide and nasty, and his eyes as glassy and feverish as the man I’d just killed.

And he roared words at the tank-monster and it flinched back from him like he’d aimed a flamethrower at it.

Crowley walked closer to it, taking his time as the thing stumbled back, that rough, unfinished face screwing into a different shape and a noise coming from it that was like a thousand tortured cats screaming at the same time.

It came for him again, stomping down the snowy road and making that horrible noise as the metal of its body started to heat up.  At first it steamed the air, and then it started glowing. Crowley stood his ground as it rumbled his way, and kept speaking, saying things that hurt my mind as much as the damned thing I was looking at did.

It tried to grab him, but Crowley danced past, taking a glancing blow from an arm that was red again, but not wet. No, it smoked and steamed and burned and as Crowley spun away I could see the fabric of his jacket catch fire from the intensity of the heat.