A hard lesson

I got to the bottom. The goon's neck was twisted something horrible. He was still twitching. I looked into his eyes and felt his pulse. Weak, and getting weaker. That was fine by me. I stepped over him and looked down the dark, torchlit hallway. I made my way quickly. No need or want to play it quiet and safe.

When I got to the end, I saw another drop of stairs. I snarled and took them too. At the bottom, I heard something threw the walls. Chanting. I picked up the pace and turned the corner. At the end, I saw something move. There was a candle. I heard a scream, Pris's scream. I leaned forward into a sprint, and bolted down the old concrete hallway. Stupid. I know better, but when you can almost taste the blood of some dumb Satanic bastard in my mouth, and you got a .45 in your hand ready to spit **** down some sonuvabitch's throat, sometimes you forget to look around.

He tripped me with a staff of some kind. I went down fast and hard on the granite, my rod skidding in front of me. I barely had time to turn over to see old Blindy on top of me. I raised my arm to defend myself, and he slashed it open with a WWI trench fighting knife. I gritted my teeth and tried to trip him. He hopped, and slammed down on my jaw with his fist. Everything swirled. No pain. No screams. No Pris. Just blackness.

.....................................

In my dream, I heard a story. The teller had Dumas' voice. Images came. Horrible images. In the dream, I was Dumas. I tried to shoot myself in the head, but it didn't work.

"It was in France, 1918. We'd just got off the boat and put in the trenches. Steep learning curve those first couple of weeks. Half of us got the machine gun, the other wished it was us. We were ordered to fall back and mine the trench. The Krauts took the bait. Their little spiked helmets nearly hit the black clouds that always hung over the battlefield.

We charged, tossing flames and grenades in front of us. I took a rifle butt to the face and a bayonet in the ribs. When he pulled it back for another stab, I dug my fingers into his eyes and pulled his skull apart. Since it hadn't hit anything vital, they doped me up and sent me over the top again that night. That's the way it was." he said, with the slightest of shrugs.

"It was after that battle we saw them the first time, crawling over the bodies in No Man's Land, drinking the juices of the dead and dying. They wore gas masks and were all gray, impossibly tall. They moved like insects, sucking them dry. Our bullets drove them off at first, but not always. We'd find one in the trench with us sometimes. It'd hide in a tunnel and drag a casuality off when no one was looking. If we heard a grenade go off in the tunnel, no one looked. We knew what happened."

Finally, we were reinforced. We went over the top in the middle of the night, sending flares up. They scattered like cockroaches over the barb wire, and for the first time in weeks it was only humans we had to worry about. The Krauts didn't fire back. We took the trench on the condition that we got them out of there as fast as we could. We'd seen enough of No Man's Land to last our entire lives.

"Only one pocket of the Krauts held out in a reserve bunker. We grenaded the shit out that thing and empty thousands and thousands of rounds down that tunnel before we went in. They were all shredded. At the back, in black robes, was Col. Steinholdt, slit open from belly to neck by a grenade. In his left hand, he held this."

Dumas said, lifting a leather book.

"Yeah, we used it. It worked out pretty well. Funny thing is, to bring ****, they want ****. As you can see, we don't want ****. So instead, they want life."

The scene faded, and I heard Pris scream again, and the words "IO INCUBI!" filled my head, bouncing madly around like a bullet in a skull.