GOTHA

GOTHA

Luke Barns knew Jimmy Smith was going to die. He wasn’t the smartest cat in the alley, hell he knew that, but he knew you couldn’t lose that much blood and have your insides on your outsides and live long. It was just that simple. A shame too, he liked ol’ ‘Jimbo’. They’d become fast friends through gunnery school and had become thick as thieves once they landed in England, crewing the same Fort, the Nelly Bell. Nelly Bell being Captain Hart’s girlfriend who nobody was allowed to talk about. But they got on so well because they were cut from the same piece of dirty cloth. Both seventeen, they dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help their sharecropper fathers work themselves to death for someone else in those dusty Texas fields. Only Jimmy’s fields were in Oklahoma, but Luke never held being an Okie against Jimbo. They were both poor white trash from scrub farms in places no one had ever heard of. Plus, they were from big families. Luke had nine younger brothers and sisters and Jimbo eight. Yeah, they were as alike as the same side of a buffalo nickel. It was a damn shame he was going to die.

‘Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! What do I do! What do I do!’

James ‘Junior’ Bonner was wailing and carrying on something awful. He was the Forts navigator and was trying to stop Jimbo from bleeding out while stuffing his insides back in the hole in his chest and stomach. Junior was an ok sort, a Yankee though, from someplace called Queens, New York. He talked funny and thought he was funny. Luke didn’t much care for his jokes. He thought he had a way with the ladies too, which he didn’t. But he was coming apart at the seams right now with Jimbo’s bloody parts all over him like that. Luke felt sorry for him.

He felt sorry for every crewman on the Nelly Bell. Fifteen hard-ass missions without a scratch and now, they were all going to die. He knew that, knew that as a dead solid certain. That’s why he wasn’t making much of a fuss over his friend Jimbo’s fate. It’s where they were all heading. Jimbo was just going to get there a little faster. Again, he felt bad, he did. It was just, that was the way of things in war and dang if he could do much about it.

A shame too. War had been the best thing that had ever happened to Luke. The best thing that had ever happened to ol’ Jimbo too. Both had enlisted a few months after Pearl Harbor, as soon as they turned 17. Boot camp had been in Biloxi, Mississippi, a hot, sticky place, but better than the dust bowl either one of them had grown up in. They stuck together through that hell and Army Air Core training. Man, they’d seen so much in the Army. Another thing they shared was they were both from religious families. Work yourself to death and then thank God for what little there was on the table. You went to bed hungry at night, you thanked God you at least had a bed, no matter you shared it with five other people. And you ever once asked why God was lettin’ so many suffer and starve, or why things were so hard in the depression, you got a bootstrap across your backside from your Pa. Jimbo’s dad was just as mean and just as big a sumbitch as Jack’s old man. No, the war coming and getting away from their families was the best thing that’d ever happened to either one of them. They’d drunk their first hard liquor together, seen their first skin show together, hell, they’d got laid for the first time together. Same girl, the same night, hell’s bells, same bed! And it just cost them ten dollars together. That girl had been what the company boys had called a ‘working girl’. Made them no never mind.

The girls in England were a lot better, and they cottoned up to the American flyboys. He and Jimbo had scored with a couple of RAF birdies just last week. In fact, they had movie dates with them tomorrow. Damn! A shame they wouldn’t make those dates. Luke thought it’d just take one more skip with his bird before he could land her. Jimbo’s? She was a work in progress. She was laced up pretty tight, but one hell of a looker. Nice gams on her.

Damn shame it was.

‘I think... I think his bleeding stopped. I think maybe he’s gonna be ok!’

Luke watched Junior for a second and shook his head. Junior had lost it completely. Poor ol’ Jimbo wasn’t bleeding anymore because there probably wasn’t anything left in him to come out. Junior was covered from head to toe in Jimbo’s blood. His heavy leather flight jacket was slick with it and the wool collar and cuffs were matted with gore.

‘I... I don’t know! Hee hee! Maybe I saved him, hee! They give you a medal for that right?!’

Damn! Luke had never seen anyone go crazy. What’d they call it, ‘shell shock’? Junior was fretting around Jimbo’s body, stuffing blood-soaked bandages in the hole in his gut and cackling like some ’tard biting off chicken heads at the circus. He hated to see that, even if it was Junior. He hated to see anyone snap like that.

Luke Barns shuddered and squeezed up tighter against his big .50 Browning. He looked out the gun port in the waist of the smoking B-17. They were below the clouds, five, six, maybe seven thousand feet. That wasn’t good, but at least he wouldn’t be freezing when he bought it. Waist gunners got the worst of the cold.

At twenty thousand feet over Germany, everything froze. No matter when the flack started up and the 109s and 190s started chewing your ass off and everything turned into livin’ hell-you still froze. That’s what he hated the most. Luke could deal with the ack-ack and the fighters-but the cold! He was a farm boy from West Texas. He’d never known cold like there was in the high blue. And he didn’t want to know it. If he ever got home, he’d find someplace warm, always warm, where the killin’ cold could never find you. Of course, there was no chance he was going home.

‘Pilot to waist! Pilot to waist! What the hell is going on back there?! Is anyone hit! What’s going on?!’

Captain Hart was having a shit fit. Understandable considering. He was in a dying bird that wasn’t gonna make the channel and bailing out over France wasn’t a great last resort.

Junior wasn’t going to answer ’cause Junior was long gone. He’d better let Hart know what was happening.

‘Cap’n, this is Barns. We’re chewed up something bad back here. Jimbo caught a cannon round in the gut. His insides are all over the place and Junior, well, he’s kind of checked out. He’s trying to patch up Jimbo but there just ain’t no use. It’s got Junior messed up somethin’ bad like I said. Nicky’s still breathing in the ball turret I think and I ain’t heard from JJ in the tail. Bye the bye Cap, are we going down?′

Silence. Luke could see Captain Hart in his head, sweat pouring off that big billboard forehead of his, dripping off that long, sloped nose. He was a hardass, but he was fair. Luke often wondered what his Nelly Bell looked like. The Cap wouldn’t share any pictures of his gal and Luke thought that was damn unfair. And…

What was that?

A mark, a black mark against the blue sky. Moving, gawd almighty! Moving like its balls wuz on fire! Moving like nothing he’d ever seen before. So damn fast!

‘Cap, we got a single bogie coming in at 9 o’clock level. And Cap, it’s moving fast, faster than anything I ever…’

Luke didn’t have time to finish his sentence, death was already there.

He had never seen anything like it as it sliced the air along the side of the Nelly Bell with an ear-splitting screech. It was black and all wing and slicked back along the centerline, sharp like a knife, with two stubby tubes coming out of its wings in the back near a center pod. A picture popped into his head. Something from grade school. A boy named Tommy Simpson had brought a poster to school that he’d gotten for Christmas. It showed dozens of different kinds of bats. That’s what he thought he was looking at now. A bat! A killer Vampire bat. Only this bat had Swastikas on its swept-back wings.

‘Ball! Ball! Nicky! You got a line on this turkey? Give me some help here!!’

No answer from the ball turret and no fire from any position. Luke opened with his heavy .50 caliber machine gun. He loved the solid, heavy buck of the Ma Deuce in his hands, the feel like he could take overall goddam German Reich and win.

But this was different.

He couldn’t get his lead down on the mystery fighter making passes at them, it was just too damn fast. All his tracers were falling well behind the devil thing meaning all his lead was falling behind. The razor-like craft was playing with them, not even firing on the first pass, just sniffing them out.

It passed out of sight, Luke sidestepped to the other waist gun, his boots slipping in his buddy’s blood. Looking out the right-side waist the fast craft passed from range before he could get a target lock on it.

‘Waist to pilot! Waist to pilot! Are you seeing this!’

No reply. Shit! Was he the only one still alive on Nelly Bell? A blood-covered Junior was still fretting with Jimbo’s body. He was laughing, crying, shaking like a hound dog shaking off ticks.

‘I’ve saved him!’ Junior bawled. ‘I think I saved him.’

Luke paid no attention to him as he stepped over his legs. His mic crackled.

‘Barns, this is Bell. Hart is out, blood loss! Took a frag to the leg and might have nicked an artery. I’ve tied it off but... I don’t know. Chute up, get ready to bail. Nelly ain’t staying in the sky for much longer.’

Bell, the co-pilot. Nice enough guy, a little too high-strung and nervous for him.

‘Bell! Did you see that bogie? I never seen anything like it! I think it’s coming back!’

Luke saw the death mark, coming in fast, getting bigger.

‘I didn’t see anything!’ Bell yelled through the static. ‘What are you talking about?’

Luke didn’t answer. There was no need to. He wasn’t going to chute up. Everyone was dead, but he and Bell and Junior were as good as. Bell could drop and get caught by these lousy Kraut bastards. He wasn’t going to be a prisoner for the rest of the war. He was going to die, but he was damn sure going to take a Nazi with him.

‘Barns answer me? I’m going to drop! We’re going down.’

The killer was filling his sights.

Lead it. Lead it. Don’t get jumpy. Stay calm and…

Luke opened. Through his sights, he saw the kill ship now. There was a bubble canopy and a short, shark-toothed snout at the point where the two wings met. It was… beautiful.

The stubby snout on the pod exploded with fire and cannon shells ripped into the fuselage all around him. Sparks, shrapnel, debris filled the tube of the Fortress as the noise of the shredding cannon shells overwhelmed him. It was like a knife being pulled down a pane of glass.

Luke fired back with a laughing scream. Ma Deuce bucked in his hands as he depressed the trigger.

My God, I feel alive! Was his last thought.