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February 28, 2007
Radioactive Nazi Zombies from Hell - Pt 1 by clone00
“Dare I say I ever believe I would end up in such a place,
end up in such a way.
What remained of our troupe lie scattered; some return. How hard it is, striking down our friends twice, three times.
The Americans do not cope well. For many of them, only their solidarity and nationalism carried them over here, but now they must fight for an altogether different, but equally nebulous reason. Mere survival has already been forgotten.”
Surveying the tracked and muddied rise, First Lieutenant Grieves walked the perimeter of the secured half-acre. A small group of ruined trees stood always over his right shoulder, the only real reminder they were still on the earth of the blasted Father-land.
Hopefully, with luck these may keep the boys grounded, he mused.
What would generously be called a company milled nervously the hill where it had remained a constant twilight for a time they could only measure yet still not believe. Thank heavens for clockwork.
“... it was then that the fog became apparent.”
As the sortie progressed and the day wore on, their shells fell from the now dug in position,
Shells fell all about their entrenchment, his platoon, 18 specialists. The rangers had been chasing artillery pieces through the hills north of the Weiser River, ambushing the limbered guns in transit.
For his seasoned Brits it was easy pickings, standard tactics: teams of riflemen supported by machine-gun cover fire. That is until they came upon their last available target of the day, a stand of hastily erected machine-gun nests within a small hilltop grove clearly engaged in pinning down most of a platoon of American Army boys at its base.
By seventeen hundred Greenwich they were charing the hill – ample supplies of small mortar fire can prove persuasive.
“...by then we had visual contact with the section of light armor, SS charing across the Eastern fields to flank our location. With heavy casualties all around we took up with the Yanks manning the German emplacements against their still walking breatheren. They took position in the drained irrigation canals, preparing to combat us from afar, barrels rising to the sky like skeletal hands, rigored joins and fingertips marking the otherwise dull, oblong silhouettes. Our radioman had be lost along with his transistors some time ago; we had had no new intelligence since eighteen hundred . Blindsided by the mobile guns we frantically set about exhausting a League of Nations of mortar rounds...”
“Grieves!” the American Lieutenant shouted.
“O'Hara! Quite the shit we're in!”
To his left, Brits launched dropped mortars down and out through the treetops – that being what O'Hara was shouting over. To the right, Americans took pot-shots with [German air-cooled mounted MG's] to their great amusement. Occasionally they hit an enemy gunnery commander.
“We've got no radioman, not a working one! There's no support! We need to withdraw! Lose them in the hills.”
The Englishman nodded passively, still barking orders at his remaining rangers.
At nineteen-forty-six hours GMT, March 8th 1945 an American atom bomb achieved areal ignition high above the streets of Berlin. By avoiding Soviet entanglement, Hitler had been able to deeply enforce his capital city – turned it into a massive bunker impervious to conventional fire-bombing, guarded by thousands of fanatics and stocked for, estimatibly, years. With the flash of countless lightning strikes the sky had turned from a brooding, coagulated purple to the pinks and greens of the Borealis. From their vantage, the Allied officers could see the massive plume rise above the northern German foothills. All fighting had ceased, the stunned Germans with their backs now to their enemy, fell silent. The ensuing pulse had destroyed all radios, all German radar, every telephone, guidance computer.
Standing like shadows against the emblazoned sky, extensions of the scorched earth beneath them, O'Hara and Grieves still stared dumbly at each other before savagely pulling on their respective gas masks and field gloves. Debris sailed above and around them, a massive wall of fire roiling and subsiding before the eyes of the brave. Men called out in wild confusion, as the officers began to wrangle their men, charging to the dell to begin organizing and capturing the surrendering and now weaponless Krauts. By Grieves' wristwatch, 65 seconds had passed since detonation, as best he could make out through the thick eyepieces of the English gas-mask that made him look not unlike some manner of insectoid apothecary.
“Over here! Get down over here!” O'Hara gestured with his Thompson as three German tank pilots trotted to the middle of a half-circle of Panzers when the second wave hit. A compression wave that blurred the air and knocked men off their feet. Dust streamed away from Berlin billowing out and around as the soldiers in possession of faster reflexes took cover behind the treads and bezels of the heavy armor. Grieves was amongst the slower and farther from cover, being enveloped in the dust cloud and thrown back several feet.
“...when finally the air settled, we all of us stood back up, and as visibility improved I saw other men already clambering to higher ground. I wiped my goggles and vaulted up upon an overturned half-track to see what they were observing – what else, I thought, could come now from Berlin. Then I saw it. The German dead picking themselves off the ground, re-setting dislocated joints and walking on shredded limbs. They had nuked the Germans, and in proper style they had risen again to take immediate, efficient revenge.
Posted by Overlord at February 28, 2007 12:22 PM
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Comments
Well, It might be trite, but you can't beat a well-written war story, now can you?
Very good chances of seeing this one in the print edition ....
Posted by: Overlord at June 30, 2007 1:02 PM