King in the Morning (work in progress)

King in the Morning

The morning report listed thirty-six effectives in K Company. Of the names I recognized, half were dead or missing. That wasn’t a big slice of the thirty-six.

 “I hear they got the new six-inch mortars up at Essen now,” David told me. He tilted his head down to keep his cigarette going in the rain, but his squared-off slab nose was doing that all by itself.

“Good,” I said. “Maybe they’ll grind up some decent potions for once. That stuff they sent up last week didn’t do anything but make my teeth green.”

“Ah, that’s the fungus, Murph,” David suggested. “Only greens we’re likely to get our teeth into for a while.”

I scratched at the gap between my front teeth. There wasn’t anything to say to that; it was the truth, pure and simple. Not “God’s honest truth”, though. Nobody would use God’s name to talk about Waldorfsbruck.

We were on the reverse slope of a hill, which was good and bad. Good, because the Austros couldn’t tell exactly where we were without sending over a broomstick, and with our drake-jockeys watching over us, they weren’t likely to survive the attempt.

Bad, because the rain went past like a babbling brook, curling over every little rock and tent peg. Sure, the grass and bushes would hold the dirt down, but that was before the U.S. Army came stomping around in our shoe-pacs. We weren’t knee-deep in gluey mud, which was something. But we were ankle-deep in cold water, which isn’t any picnic either.

Plus, whenever the Enemy settled in for a while, everything else went gray and died. It takes a lot of cursing to keep a vampire officer up and at ‘em night after night. Takes even more to keep their mortal soldiers in line, when every decent instinct is trying to leap right out of their skulls and drag the rest of them along for the ride.

The Austro-Hungarian morale problem was less like our Army’s and more like our prisons’, or our psycho wards. There’s one, count ‘im, ONE Angel of Mental Stability in the whole of the Hierarchy, and don’t think for a minute he’s not half buggy himself from the flood of prayers he gets from our Invocational Warfare boys. Fighting the undead, we wind up with blasted near more head cases than neck wounds.

Of course they’re not all vampires. For one thing, who would they eat?

So all those evil spirits churning around gets into the soil, and the trees, and whatever lived around here, and it wears ‘em out. Can a germ feel despair? I don’t see it, myself, but I did know that an open cut up at the front lines never got infected. Guys got sloppy about cleaning their mess kits, and never a bellyache. Docs didn’t have to wash their gear in alcohol, even, although they did anyway.

Waldorfsbruck was dead.  Deader than Caesar. Deader than chivalry, in fact, because there are still a few Knights of St. John around, holding back the Dark with their bulletproof crosses. Everything natural except us was dead, and we were trying mighty hard to make the UN-natural dead, too.

The unnaturals on the Enemy’s side, of course. Our golems and dwarves are just good Old Folk.

“So,” I said after I tracked down the last piece of breakfast, “how many guys do we really have?”

“Twenty-some,” David allowed after a pause for thought. “Twenty-two, I think? Simms and them’re at Mine Warfare School until, uh, the 28^th. What’s today?”

“It’s right there at the top of the report,” I groused, to keep from having to admit I didn’t know the date, either.

“Can’t the Old Man get ‘em back early?” David said. “I thought we had our own dwarves for all that underground stuff.”

I chewed my lip, where a baby moustache was boldly defying regulations.

“Yeah, but dwarves,” I said. He knew what I meant. There aren’t many of the Old Folk left, although they’re more common in Europe than back home in America. We’d been around them some since coming Over Here, and they weren’t bad guys, just different. You literally never knew where they’d pop up. We have maps, because the ground is flat and we can’t fly. They got map rooms, layered with different colors like a Dagwood sandwich. Always looking up, always crouching with their hands in the dirt. Always tasting everything. Not twitchy, like some guys get on the Line. The exact opposite, in fact. So quiet and calm that when they finally did speak, you couldn’t believe that down-in-the-well rumble was actually coming from them.

Also, I could never understand their accent.

“We gotta get better at this tunneling bit,” I opined. “There ain’t but so many dwarves to go ‘round. And the other side’s got most of ‘em.”

“Zat why their dwarves’re so much better’n our dwarves?”

“Mebbe,” I allowed. “And they’re trained better. Cuz they’re really trained, like a dog. Ours are free to do whatever they want.”

“S’what we’re fighting for,” David drawled out. “Ain’t it?”

“Not getting bit in the middle of the night’s the main thing,” I countered. “But, yeah, freedom. I guess. Hope someone gets some, somewhere. Cuz there ain’t an eye-a-newt of a lot of it in th’Army.”

I hear back home some guys think the way we cuss Over Here makes us sound sissified. Back there you hear “damn” and “Hell” right out on the street, some places. They can go tell the Marines, the way I see it. Why give the Enemy any more ammunition?

I scratched a little – at least the lice died up here on the Line – and stood on an ammo crate to see through the rain. There weren’t any trees left; the boys burned them for warmth before the place went gray. So it wasn’t hard to make out our tents, three twelve-man rigs and a Baker for the captain. We were down in a shallow swale that was pretty good concealment before the bushes died. As it was now, it was still cover from the chest down.

To our right was the pavilion of the Excellent Master of the Oaken Hunt. The bodies of Austrian soldiers, their horses, and their dogs hung head-down from exquisite brass arches. The carbon-arc spotlight filaments were smoking hot; Elves like it bright. The stovepipe chimney was roaring, too, because Dwarves like it hot. And there were piles of slime in the corners, with a Troll wriggling fat and happy in each one, half in and half out of the tent.

I hear they call it coalition warfare.

If the vampires win, there'll be no room for the other Old Peoples. They can't drink elf blood – safer to gargle with gasoline -- and the spirits of nature can't stand to be around the undead. So we’ve got that in common.

On the left were three trucks with tarps over the sides for a lean-to. Those British guys with the berets. Bred to command. They can make you do whatever they want. Tell you to eat a live grenade and you'll think it's the best idea ever. Doesn't work so hot when your enemy speaks one of eleven languages, though. The Austros deliberately kept their nationalities separate; you never knew if you were up against a Serbian regiment, or Galician Poles, or Ruthenians, whatever they were. Can't understand your Voice, can't obey it. There wasn't generally a lot of work for the Commandos.

 An infantry regiment has nine rifle companies, A through I. Headquarters is J-for-Juliet, the artillery is L, M and N, and Oscar Co. is transportation. Sometimes there’s an armored company attached, but they’re all numbers instead of letters. What with most of the fighting being at night, every regiment’s had a reconnaissance company authorized for a while now.

That’s us, K-for-King. Three four-jeep platoons, four men to a jeep plus a lieutenant, in theory, for each platoon. Three hardback jeeps and two specially-sneaky trucks for a headquarters. We were supposed to have fifteen jeeps, but only six were running, because of tires. You know how they say “Mountains eat tires?” When the other side gets elemental dominance, that’s literally true.

But what was left of King Company could easily fit in our remaining vehicles. And of course, all the weapons of our full fifteen-jeep strength were sticking out of our six somewhere.

We were real short on officers, too. As in zero. With five stripes, I was senior man among the living, so until they slapped butter bars on some college boy, it was my company. King of the Kings.

We’re a reconnaissance company in theory. Most times, we’re the regimental reserve, the Colonel’s bodyguard, military police and rock-straighteners. But once in a while, when the gremlins stop hexing our Jeeps, we go out and poke around to find out where the Enemy is, and what he’s up to.

The Austros, we know about. They have to have a vampire to keep their men in hand, so they move around in company-size clumps. Officer likes the night, but the men can only see in the day. So they move around at twilight, which is less than an hour in the mountains. Our overlays show every enemy unit in the valley. Every day.

But the real Enemy supplying the Austros with their magical oomph? They’re a little beyond my pay grade. Nobody knows how many Dark Forces there are, or what they can do. We don't even know what they really want. When every demon with any influence in their ranks is both smarter than us and a psychotic liar, how can we trust anything we hear?

Well, yeah. We can trust one Source. But He doesn't issue morning reports.

+++

HQ THIRD ARMY

TO CO 38 INF REG

SENT 10 22 44 1823 ZULU

MESSAGE BEGINS

SKINNY YOU OLD DOG ALWAYS KNEW YOU’D WEAR EAGLES.

SORRY ABOUT MORTIMER.

CRYSTAL BALL CROWD THINKS THEY KNOW LOCATION ENEMY COMMAND RESERVE. EXACT NATURE UNCLEAR. PHRASE USED IS QUOTE REPLACEMENT SOLDIER DRIVING UNQUOTE.

YOU ARE TO CONFIRM ENEMY HQ IN HASSBERG. MAP REFERENCE 012749-376448. DESTROY IF CONFIRMED. X-RAY CO, CCB, 331^st ARMORED ATTACHED FOR DURATION OF MISSION.

USE THE COMMANDOS IF THEY AGREE. WILL WORK IT OUT WITH MONTY LATER.

YOUR REQUEST MORE REPLACEMENTS AND ARTILLERY AMMO DENIED. YOUR REQUEST TIRES EN ROUTE FROM ASCHAFFENBURG ETA 29 OCT 1944.

MESSAGE ENDS.

+++

Our regiment had been commanded by Moe Mortimer, a light colonel who was a lawyer originally, for three months. Somehow the Enemy got hold of enough traces to make a decent voodoo doll, though they call it something else in German. By the time he was ordered back to hospital for decursing, Old Moe was more pins than needles.

I liked him, for what that was worth. He wasn’t tough as nails, but he pretended to be for the doggies’ sake. Never forgot a face, or a map reference. That meant he never had to bawl out a subordinate for failing to remind him of something. His command post was always friendly, even in an artillery storm. Nobody blew up around Moe – not emotionally, anyway.

It ain’t good when officers fight. Makes the guys think nobody’s in charge.

But now we had a full bull colonel again, Alastair “Skinny” Denton, West Point ’21. He was a lot more formal than Old Moe.

“Sergeant, have you any men in your company who have been to Hab-berg?” the Colonel asked me.

“No, sir,” I said immediately. “I ,uh, I don’t even know where that is.”

He looked up, startled.

“You’re with the reconnaisance company, aren’t you?” he snapped.

“Yes, sir.” King of the Kings.

“And you’ve never heard of Hab-berg?”

“I’ve heard of HAM-burg,” I said, trying to be helpful. “But I’ve never been there. It’s a ways up north.”

“I know where Hamburg is,” he said.

He poked a spot on the map.

“Oh, HASSberg,” I said helpfully. “The Krauts spell a double-ess like a funny letter B. Sure I been to Hassberg, sir. Well, not in it. But I seen it from this hill right over here.”

“There’s no hill on the map, Sergeant.”

“It’s not much of a hill, sir.”    

                                          

He mused.

“Hass-berg … that means ‘Hateville’, doesn’t it?”

“Hate Mountain, sir. ‘Berg’ with an ‘e’ is mountain.”

“Hate Mountain. But there’s no mountain anywhere near,” he said.

“Could be Hill 608, sir. It’s rocky. Or mebbe it’s rhetorical.”

“Rhetorical?”

“A flight a fancy, sir.”

“Nothing around here’s what it’s supposed to be,” he complained.

 +++

“You are Sergeant First Class Mithrandir Murphy?” said a healthy specimen in spatter-camouflaged overalls. He carried a machine rifle and had a bunch of little boxes slung over his back – tin can, leather box, some long skinny cartridge cases, and something that looked like a giant stick grenade. He had a knife in his left hand, which he was using to sharpen a big stick.

“Randy,” I said. I didn’t salute – German ranks are obscure, and anyway I didn’t feel like handing him the Top Dog medallion right off. He asked the question the way a cop would – like he was challenging me to deny I was Sgt. Mithrandir Murphy.

“Martin Brenner,” he said. “I am to guide you into Hassberg.”

He looked at me; he looked at David. I’m half a guy wide and Dave’s half a man tall. Our company had a Rosetti, a Finkelstein, an O’Connor and a Pulaski, same as most outfits. But an Elvish-American and a Brooklyn dwarf together was a little unusual. For people with such little countries, Europeans didn’t seem to mix as much as we did.

I pointed to the lightning bolts on Brenner’s collar.

“You Weather Corps? What are you doing running around in the woods?”

“Nein. The letters are SS.”

I saw it now. Felt kinda stupid. But Brenner was explaining:

“It means … protection squadron, you would say. We started as bodyguards for our leader.”

“But you ain’t any more?” David asked.

“Nein. He died.”

“So, uh, what do you do now?” I asked.

He grinned. “We make sure his escort to Hell is as numerous as possible.”

David’s bulging fist came up.

“Hey, watch with the language, buddy! You know what you’re doing, cursing the guy’s name like that?”

“Oh, he knows. We are all going there. But we will have many, many servants when we arrive.”

David couldn’t let it go.

“So when you kill a guy, he has to work for you in the afterlife, is that it?” he asked. “You better be right, pal. What if it turns out you owe him, instead of him owing you?”

“Then Hell will be unpleasant,” Brenner said after a moment of thought. “And so?”

“That’s what my uncle used to say.” Dave was off and rolling. “And so? If you’re going to be punished anyway, why not give in to temptation? What can they do, hang you twice?”

David wanted to make sure Brenner understood him. He’d have made a heckuva schoolteacher.

“You see where that leads, Marty? Once you slip, just once, you might as well go ahead and become the worst son of a bulldog anybody ever saw, you follow me? What’s to lose? Thinking like that leads to a whole world of psychos.”

“But if you are damned, Corporal, and you know it? What then?”

“Hey, there’s always hope,” David said.

“That is not your people’s view,” Brenner said. “Perhaps you do not agree with them?”

“What, Jews?”

“Dwarves.”

“What, like your grave has to be on granite? Like slate is bad luck? Like you gotta braid copper into your beard with your left hand, but if you do it with your right hand, you gotta eat a peck of coal to wash away the taboo? Who can even keep track of what the dirt farmers believe, back in the Old Country? My opa came over to Brooklyn to get away from all that.”

“But you are ‘back in the Old Country’ now,” Brenner pointed out. “You do not share your kinsmen’s views?”

“Hey, buddy, look at the patch,” David said, jabbing his shoulder at him. “I’m an American, got that? Hundred percent. Everything else is just … ancient history.”

“You do not like the old things, then?”

David smiled tightly.

“You could sum it up that way, yeah.”

Brenner smiled back and resumed sharpening his stake.

“Good. For I do not like the old things either.”

+++

King went up the mountains without complaint. Not out loud, anyhow. We drove to Dieffelsbach and a little past, then dismounted. The other side of the mountain was between the lines, our natural habitat. But a jeep moving around up there made smoke and noise, too much for our St. Hubert’s medals to mask. A jeep can’t use a miraculous medallion unless it accepts Christ, and so far, Detroit’s turning out a load of pagans.

“Atheists,” said David. “Cars are atheists. Without thought, they can’t have gods, right?”

He couldn’t read minds. I just had a habit of thinking out loud.

And anyway, “They stop at the darndest times. They get spooked by gremlins and won’t move. Brand new parts rust away overnight. I call that paganism, or rank superstition. They ain’t got no faith,” I said.

In some outfits, the fact that I wear five stripes and David has two would have ended the debate right there. But Recon puts a premium on brains, not obedience. When I was a corporal, that seemed like a better idea than it did now.

We broke off twigs for our helmet covers. Brenner had a cloth sack for his helmet instead of a mesh of cord like we used. He used his knife to cut slits in it, then ran the branches through the slits. I asked him why the cloth cover, and he turned back one corner. It was white on the inside.

“For snow,” he said. “Half the year is winter, not so?”

Yeah. Just because the Krauts had been fighting old Franz the Austro for five years before America got interested, that was supposed to mean they knew it all. They did, in fact, know just about every trick about modern warfare. But they didn’t have to have the know-it-all attitude to go along with it.

I’d heard some Germans didn’t act like they knew it all. Back when the war started, there had been a lot more of that sort.

I limbered up a wisecrack, something about New York winter camouflage being a slushy gray. Before I could let it go, though, the ground slid sideways under my boots.

The bang came an instant later.

Everybody froze but me. I was moving toward the sound of the explosion.

Line troops are supposed to scatter when they’re under artillery fire, seeking the nearest cover. But at night in the woods, movement attracts the eye. Recon troops are supposed to freeze until they locate the source of the threat.

Not that everyone who wears the Eye on his collar actually does what he’s supposed to do. I passed a couple of guys who were huddled in a puddle behind a fallen tree, their heads jerking every which way in terror. One of them, I was pretty sure, was Syzmkowiak. I loomed out of the black across their line of sight and headed on – there wasn’t time to deal with them now. At least they didn’t shoot me, thinking I was Franz, or some black monster leaping through the darkness. Well, I wasn't Franz, anyway.

In a little pine-filled swale, the branches were full of trapped smoke. I grabbed at the skinny trees, skidded to a stop.

Corporal Spencer was down at the bottom, minus most of his leg. His buddy, McNeill, was lying on his stomach at the lip, right where the ground started to slope down. He was about thirty yards from Spencer.

“Mines!” McNeill hissed.

My training kicked in and suppressed my urge to swear. Some of the cleanest mouths you’ll find come out of beast barracks.

I saw it all plain as print. Spencer was laboring up the rise, hitting rocks and scared to make noise. A streambed with pines would absorb the noise, feel soft underfoot, and get his head under cover for a little ways. It was the obvious choice.

So obvious, in fact, that the Austros thought of it too.

“Follow me,” I told McNeill. “Walk in my footprints.”

“What if it’s a Bouncing Betty?” he whispered. Those were nasty little devices which popped up about three feet in the air before they exploded, throwing shrapnel at about waist height, or a little lower. Guys were rightly terrified of them. It was odd, though, for McNeill to be more worried about his privates than his corporal. I’d learned one more thing about one of my men tonight.

“Then you’ll have armor, woncha?” I said, and poked a thumb at my chest.

I added “C’mon,” which I wouldn’t have done a minute ago. I had pegged McNeill as one of the steady ones.

I took big steps, holding onto the pines for balance. Sap made sticky patterns on my hands. My boots crackled the dry needles just a little, but they were so quiet even McNeill, three steps back, probably didn’t hear ‘em.

Three steps, heck – he hadn’t taken more than one step down into the swale.

“Keep up,” I growled, “or you’ll forget where I stepped! There’s no mud to make footprints down here.”

“I can see ‘em,” he responded. “You brought your own mud with you.”

Even in the midnight blur, he was right. My bootprints were outlined with dark mud from further down the mountain.

“Close up anyway,” I said, and the tone was a threat. Are we going to have to do it this way?

He closed up. He didn’t grumble, but he didn’t grovel, either. His honor was preserved. So do men, if they are to stay men, go to war at each other’s side.

It’s still better than trying to make us into robots. That was the other side’s gag.

Spencer was a medic before joining Recon. He had his bandages out, and twisted around his upper leg, but he hadn’t tightened the windlass to make a proper tourniquet. He had his rosary in his hands, and he was whispering.

His hands and face glowed like the full moon when I got there. He’d lost too much blood.

I turned the windlass (a dowel included in the first-aid pack for just this reason) and tightened the bandage around his upper thigh, compressing his artery against his thighbone. I didn’t see that it made a lot of difference.

McNeill was there, and slit Spencer’s pant leg away so we could see what we were doing. I pulled my compass out from inside my shirt and opened the cover, so the saintelmo backing would light up Spencer’s wound. Down here in the trees, it didn’t risk the mission, just us.

“He’s cold,” said McNeill, holding Spencer’s arm. “Spence? You there, buddy?”

Spencer was trying to talk. There was nothing wrong with his throat or chest, but he couldn’t force the words up. He was weakening fast.

“Spencer,” I said, taking hold of his hand. The tourniquet loosened, but we were beyond that now.

“Spencer, listen to me. I’m not gonna let you die. You hear?”

He nodded, then gagged, like he’d swallowed something huge.

“You gotta help me. When you feel it coming, fight back, you hear me? Cuss, yell, spit, anything, just don’t go to sleep,” I said.

McNeill got out a rosary. He got up on his knees.

“McNeill, take two steps back,” I said sharply and clearly. It was the loudest thing we’d heard since the mine went off.

He obeyed automatically, his legs moving even while his face reproached me. Weren’t we going to give Spencer a proper sendoff?

As it happened, no. We weren’t.

Spencer pulled sharply on my hand. I almost lost him then. He let out a long, long breath and groaned. I slapped him.

“Fight, Spence! Fight! Eyes on me!” I barked.

Then he shuddered, and he was dying. He was trying as hard as anyone could ask, but there just wasn’t enough blood left in his body. The End was coming.

Now.

I got one foot under myself and heaved. I grabbed my wrist with my other hand, putting my back, my leg, both arms, even my neck into hauling Spencer back from the Pit.

It felt like he dropped about three feet. His whole weight was on my hand. There was a shocking lot of it, too – how’d he racked up so much guilt so young? Kids these days – but he was helping, pushing along with me. He wasn’t making a lot of difference, because it was his first time dying. He didn’t know what to do.

But me, I’d been around some.

I hauled for all I was worth. I leaned back, getting my weight into it. Yes, I cheated some – my other knee was in his armpit, acting like a pivot to lever him up out of the ground.

From the waist down, he was deep into the Pit. There was still dirt there, under the pine needles, but he was past all that now. Things brushed at his leg – legs! – knocking him this way and that.

He got his other hand up and grabbed hold of mine. He pulled. He was stronger than me – if we’d have been arm-wrestling, I’d have lost. But we were both on the same side tonight.

I dragged him up to his knees and stood up leaning backwards. If I fell now, he might drop right over the Edge. But his weight, and his strength, anchored me. I took a grinding step back, pulling up, and his legs slid up out of the ground, into view. One of them was solid mud and dirt down to his torn combat boot. The other was tan and new and utterly hairless, like the leg of a twenty-two-year-old newborn.

Something tugged at his heel one last time and retreated, beaten.

I panted, with exertion and relief. Spencer came to his senses with a visible click. He grinned.

“Thanks, Sarge,” he said. “Guess I shouldn’ta tried that shortcut, huh?”

“Well, you’ll remember it next time,” I said, too glad to remember my sergeant’s growl. I grinned at McNeill, too, who hadn’t seen it before. He was shocked.

Spencer nodded sideways at me, looking at his buddy.

“The Sarge’s pop was Elvish, straight off the boat,” he explained. “You know how they can’t die? Well, he got some of that from his old man.”

“They can die,” I said, shaking a little with elation. “They just don’t get old. And when they do die, if they do, they don’t go to Heaven, or the other place. Don’t go much of anywhere. They’re air spirits, right? No air up there.”

“How bout you, Sarge? Can you die?” said Spencer, laughing. “Hate to lose you, after all this.”

“Sure I can,” I said. I put a little rasp in it, because Spencer was getting chummy. Much as every decent instinct demands that men get a little weepy when someone’s been pulled back from the brink of death, the Army frowns on it. Can get outta hand.

“Sure I can,” I said again. “I just get better, is all.”

I let go of his hand, but my arm didn’t drop. Our rosaries were entangled.

I had to admit, that was kinda funny.