DARK

The rain wasn’t falling so much as hanging in the trees, a thick, freezing mist that smelled of diesel, wet pine, and burned wool.

Erich’s right boot was full of blood. It wasn’t his—most of it belonged to a corporal whose name he had forgotten, who had been standing next to him in the trench when the mortar dropped.

The blood had soaked through Erich’s trousers, dried sticky and cold against his calf, and now, with every heavy step up the muddy incline, it squelched inside the leather.

“Stop,” a voice rasped behind him.

Erich didn’t stop. He kept his chin tucked into the collar of his damp tunic, clutching his submachine gun against his ribs to keep the mud off the receiver.

“Erich, hold up!”

Erich pulled up against the trunk of a fallen spruce, his lungs burning with the frost. He turned around, wiping grey grease and rainwater from his eyes.

Ten paces down the slope, two shadows were struggling through the waist-high fern growth. They were carrying a third man between them in a makeshift hammock made from a torn, muddy canvas poncho.

“He’s slipping,” the taller shadow grunted. That was Heini. His helmet was gone, his dark hair plastered across his forehead like wet seaweed. He had his bare hands hooked under the canvas, his arms shaking from the strain. “Keller, tighten your grip, you useless bastard.”

“I can’t!” Keller pulled his hands out of the canvas and leaned against a sapling, bent double, coughing violently. He was young—maybe nineteen—and the skin around his nose was raw and bright red. “My hands are numb, Heini! I can’t feel my fingers!”

Between them, suspended in the sagging center of the green canvas, the injured man shifted.

A wet, rhythmic whistling sound came from his mouth every time he took a breath. He wasn’t crying out anymore. He was just making that high, airless whistle.

“Get up, Keller,” Erich said. His voice was dry, flat, stripped of authority or anger. It just sounded tired.

“Look at him, Erich,” Keller gasped, wiping his nose on his damp sleeve. “Look at the leg. It’s soft. He’s cold as iron already. Why are we dragging him up a bloody mountain?”

“Because he’s still breathing,” Heini snarled, taking a step toward Keller and shoving him against the bark. “You drop him again, Keller, and I’ll leave you down in the gully with the Tommies.”

“Don’t touch me,” Keller spat, scrambling backward in the mud, his Karabiner slung loose over his shoulder, knocking hard against the timber. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”

A rustle of wet leaves sounded from higher up the ridge, off to their right.

Erich raised the barrel of his MP 40, his elbow locked tight against his side. “Who’s that? Stand.”

A figure stepped out from behind a thick cluster of hemlock. It was Jakob. He was holding his left arm tight against his stomach, his hand wrapped in a thick, dirty ball of field dressing that had turned black with mud and wet blood at the center. He didn’t look at Erich. He kept his eyes fixed back down the slope, toward the gray wall of fog where the rest of their position used to be.

“They’re not coming up the road,” Jakob muttered. He was chewing frantically on the inside of his lip, his jaw twitching. “The English. They brought up armor. I heard the treads down by the creek.”

“How far?” Erich asked.

“Close enough to smell their tobacco,” Jakob spat. He looked at the three men with the canvas poncho. “Is that Willi?”

“Yeah,” Heini muttered, spitting a dark gob of phlegm into the ferns.

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet.”

From somewhere behind Jakob, down in the thick brush where the shadows were darkest, came the sound of someone heavy stumbling over a root, followed by a low, wet groan.

Another man emerged, leaning heavily on a birch branch he was using as a crutch. He was bent nearly double, his right hand pressed hard against his abdomen, dark fingers dug into the cloth of his tunic as if trying to hold something inside. He didn’t speak. He just slouched against a rock, his face greyer than the mist, sweat pouring down his cheeks despite the freezing cold.

“Hans,” Erich said, eyeing the dark, glistening stain spreading around the man’s belt. “You still with us?”

Hans didn’t look up. He just gave a single, tight nod, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw muscles bulged like cords under his skin.

And then, from the bottom of the slope, came a small, thin sound.

It wasn’t a curse or a battle call. It was a whimpering, high-pitched question, almost lost in the steady drip of water from the pine needles.

“Erich?”

Erich closed his eyes for a second. He took a slow breath of cold air, feeling the burn deep in his chest, then opened them again.

Sitting on a wet stump at the very tail end of their ragged line was Karl. He sat completely still, his hands pulled up into his armpits.

A broad, filthy field dressing was wrapped four times around his head, covering his face entirely from the bridge of his nose to his forehead. Two dark, round spots of dried crimson were stamped into the white cloth directly over his eye sockets.

“Erich?” Karl whispered again, tilting his head back and forth, his ears straining toward the sound of their voices. “Are we stopping? Who’s there?”

Erich stepped down the slope, his boot squelching in the mud, and rested a cold hand on the blind boy’s shoulder.

“I’m here, Karl,” Erich said.

Karl let out a shuddering breath, his shoulders dropping two inches. “I lost my helmet in the ditch,” he murmured, his voice trembling like a child’s. “It got knocked off when the shell hit the dug-out. Did somebody pick it up?”

“Don’t worry about the helmet,” Erich said gently. “Just hang onto my belt.”

“It’s dark, isn’t it?” Karl whispered, clutching at Erich’s wet wool sleeve with frantic fingers. “The sun went down?”

Erich looked around them.

The forest was a wall of gray trunks and black needles, choked with fog. The sky above the canopy was the color of dirty pewter. It was barely mid-afternoon, but down here on the valley floor, the light was dying fast.

“Yeah, Karl,” Erich said softly, looking at the dark red circles on the boy’s bandages. “Sun’s down. It’s night.”

Behind them, deep down in the gut of the valley where their camp had been an hour ago, a single heavy mortar shell detonated—a low, flatTHUMPthat vibrated through the mud beneath their boots.

Heini looked down at Willi in the canvas sling, then back up at Erich. “Which way?”

Erich turned his back on the smoke rising from the valley. He pointed up the ridge, into the dense, black timber where no paths were marked.

“Up,” Erich said. “We get over the crest before the frost sets in.”

How does this feel now? Notice how we didn’t list or count the squad—the reader simply experiences them emerging out of the fog through Erich’s eyes as they struggle up the slope.