The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, Part 1 of 17

Having barely survived the charnel house of Vesuvius and the abominations in Spain, Lucky Ford sets forth to bring the battle to the front door of Department Three’s monsters and mad scientists. Though they’ve suffered terrible losses, the Office cannot ignore the opportunity to attack their enemies where they feel most safe: within the borders of Germany itself.

The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

Operation Arm Breaker is the third story in Season 1 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford. It directly follows the second mission, The Butcher and the Black Tide, and every part contains spoilers. If you haven’t read Butcher yet, start with Part 1 before reading any further below.

Content Warnings: Violence, Death, Gun Violence, Animal Violence, Gore, Mild Swearing

WEDNESDAY MORNING, JULY 14, 1943
WEST OF SAULDORF
BADEN-ELSAß, NAZI GERMANY

The backbone-melting chorus of howls was coming closer. Bloodthirsty brays cut through the gray air and bounced off the ruined forest's cracked trunks. The pack had the scent, and nothing could deter them. They coursed through through fog, smoke, and ash, between burning trees and molten earth. The Nazis' twisted hounds didn't care about flames. They were trained to ignore pain and to ignore fear. They were trained to kill.

Lucky Ford raised his rifle and took a breath to steady his aim. He had not yet tried to escape his rocket capsule; its thirty-mile, zero-gravity drop and hard landing had drained the blood from his brain, and the steel-shearing breaching charges had rattled out whatever senses remained to him.

Black smoke and orange flame rose from below and Vesuvian gray from above. The world beyond Lucky's front sights was blurry, pulsing in and out of focus with his every heartbeat. The colors twisted and clashed, slashing against each other in a way that turned his stomach. The earth had been churned by his arrival, raised in alien ridges that challenged his equilibrium even further. Lucky nearly hurled.

It was not yet dawn. Whatever light that could pierce the igneous cloud cover had yet to bubble over the edge of the world. The DIVERT capsule was hot around him, but Lucky couldn't bring himself to stand. Its crater’s steaming walls loomed over him, furious. Beyond them, the howls.

“Wake up, private!” Brigadier General 'Goldbrick' Stephens ordered. He crested the crater’s edge and skidded down its inner slope, showering Lucky with charred dirt. The general was white, bald, and built like a sledgehammer. He had his Thompson submachine gun to his shoulder and the long holster for his sawed-off shotgun was unclasped on his hip. He reached into the capsule door and held out a big hand. Lucky took it and the general hauled him out into Germany.

Goldbrick took a knee, using the crater lip as cover to watch the circling shapes beyond the flames. The mutated beasts were two hundred yards out, seconds away for them, loping between burning pines. They were smart, never exposing themselves for a clear shot.

Lucky pushed himself away from the capsule. Its shell was still warm from where the charges had blasted its hatch off. He knelt next to the general, watching and listening to those things. The crater was boiling hot, its churned earth having been blasted by the capsule's braking rockets minutes before. Lucky clenched his teeth and took the heat.

“What are they?” he managed to ask.

“Mannessers,” Goldbrick said. Lucky knew just enough German for that one: 'man eaters.'

The general's capsule had touched down a couple dozen yards from Lucky's, kicking up its own blast-wall of flame that raged through the surrounding forest. All around them, the trees leaned away. From above they'd look like bull's eyes, with scorched, fallen pine trunks arrayed in a circle, all pointing away from they'd crashed down.

Lucky had no idea where the rest of their team was, and he didn't have time to worry about it: the first mannesser had reached him. It lunged out from a pile of smoking trees, jaws wide and eager for a warm meal.

“Hell,” Goldbrick grunted. He clenched his jaw, showing off the hard-earned mouthful of golden teeth he was known for. He opened fire. His Tommy gun chattered, sending a barrage of .45's at the huge dog bounding through a geyser of flame. The pony-sized creature slavered and snarled, its wide tongue lolling between steel-capped fangs as it sprinted at the officials. Bullets kicked up dirt and charred bark around it.

One round found its mark, and the monster yelped and turned tail. It was patterned like a Doberman, though its head was sleek and earless. A whip antenna curved over its back, buried in the base of its skull and arcing over to its cropped tail. Unnatural muscles bulged and twisted beneath is scar-scored skin. Lucky tried to track it with his Garand, but it was too fast. The mannesser disappeared between fallen trees.

To their left, another dog snarled and another gun fired, a full-auto burst from a smaller weapon. Lucky recognized an M3 grease gun by its staccato report.

“Grand!” Goldbrick shouted, his deep voice a thunderous roar. “Grand!”

“General!” a British soldier called back through the smoke.

“Head count!” Goldbrick ordered.

“Yes, sir!” Grand confirmed.

A black shadow hissed between blackened trunks at Lucky's twelve. He pulled the trigger, forcing it away with a salvo of thirty-ought-six rounds. It snarled from behind cover and bounded off. Each recoil banged against his recently-repaired ribs. The Osteo-Bond that Doctor Pietrzak had injected into them strained against each shock.

“Sir!” Grand shouted again. He climbed over a tangle of collapsed pines and slid down the inside of Lucky’s crater. John Graves, called Five Grand, or just Grand, trailed smoke behind him. The airborne volcanic ash already covered his fair face, darkening his blonde handlebar mustache and filling the deep surgical scar that channeled his buzzed scalp.

“Miller and Cheddarwright are holding ground three hundred meters west,” Grand reported. His pale skin was stained gray with the same ash that clung to his blonde beard. He spat black grit and said: “Grease and Bastedo are working on Benjamin's capsule. His breaching charges failed.”

It only took the general a second to analyze the situation and come up with a plan of action.

“Gather your gear, Lucky,” Goldbrick said. He hefted his own pack and barked an order to Grand: “Take us to Benjamin.”

Lucky threw his pack over his shoulder. It was stretched tight as a drum and heavy as a corpse. He had to be ready for anything. Silver bullets for Vargulf, aerosol spray that could melt spinnennetz threads, thermite grenades, an anti-tank mine, yards of bandages, syringes of Osteo-Bond, rolls of hurricane tape, gas masks with six kinds of filters, and fifty more pounds of gadgets, gear, and ammo.

Lucky's old Colt 1911 was strapped tight to his hip, freshly cleaned and about eight ounces of caked ash lighter than when he'd last fired it in Spain. The M1 Garand pulled tight against his shoulder was brand new, fresh out of the crate. Lucky could punch train tickets at fifty yards with a Garand, but since he joined the Office he'd taken on a habit of losing them. The pineapple grenades hanging from his webbing clanked together when he crested the rim of the crater. Grand and the general were just as loaded down, ready for a hell of a fight. They took off through the smoke and flame, toward the sound of gunfire.

Lucky followed close, leaping over crackling trees and sliding down smaller craters between them and their team. The DIVERT Bolt-class rocket capsules weren't the only things that had been dropping from the sky in southern Germany. The Russians had been at it, too. Their super mortars had been softening the area for days, driving all but the most mindless Nazis into their bunkers. The constant barrage was cover, as well. When a hundred shells the size of a Model T fell every day, no one was likely to notice a handful of capsules plummeting earthward in the chaos.

Artificial thunder rumbled from the east. Ivan was still at it, launching another wave of high-explosive distractions from over a thousand miles away. Every kraut in the area would be tucked under tables and door frames while the officials had the run of the place, ducking between salvos. They just had to survive the mannessers. Lucky could hear their enraged snorts closing in on his heels.

“Twenty yards!” Grand shouted.

“Over here!” Miller called. Lucky couldn't see through the smoke, but he recognized Miller's precise British accent reverberating through his gas mask. A mannesser howled in response, just yards behind Lucky. He leaned into his run, trying to squeeze a little more speed out of his battered, laden body.

The air snapped as something whipped past Lucky's head. He heard a yelp and the sound of a heavy body crashing to the ground behind him. The hound that had been on his heels tumbling through the dirt, kicking up ash as it struggled against an arrow embedded deep where its neck met its shoulders.

“Good shot, Cheddarwright!” the general shouted.

“My pleasure, sir!” an Englishwoman called back.

The ground rose in front of them and Lucky realized they'd reached another crater. He followed Grand and the general in a mad scramble up the steep incline and flopped over the top, landing in a heap next to a crashed DIVERT capsule. Heat still radiated off its metal shell, but that didn't stop a pair of men from wrenching at its jammed hatch. Lucky dashed back up the inner wall of the crater, rifle in hand. When he looked back, the mannesser was gone.

The Direct Insertion Vehicle (Expendable Rocket Type), the DIVERT, was Lucky's squad's one-way ticket into southern Germany. The capsules were no bigger than coffins on the inside, and they heated up like locomotive boilers when in flight. They were armored bells with submarine doors that had fallen off the noses of forty-yard-long rockets. The drop was like hitting a wall in a deuce-and-a-half six times in a row at full speed.

Lucky never wanted to see one of the awful things again. While they allowed them to launch from the Mediterranean, through an active volcanic eruption, and right into the enemy's home, soaring too high and falling too fast to be intercepted, what they didn't offer was options. The officials had no back-up, nothing but the weapons on their backs, and no way out but through.

Two officials covered the lip of this crater, scanning the charred forest for mannessers. Miller splayed out flat on his belly, keeping watch with his M3 grease gun. The stubby, .45-caliber-spewing submachine gun looked small in his gloved hands, and Lucky didn't trust its odds against the pack of Nazi war dogs that prowled just beyond the flames. Miller waited deathly still and, behind his gas mask, eerily calm.

“We have the eastern approaches covered, General Stephens, though I am afraid the mannessers are seeking to flank us,” Miller reported. He was covered helmet-to-bootheel in a sealed environment suit, with only his bright blue eyes exposed behind his gas mask's glass lenses. It kept him freezing cold, enabling the conduction of the strange electrical current that kept him alive and able to recover from any wound. The man also never ate, slept, or forgot a thing. A good ally to have. A large bush shifted next to him, then spoke.

“The blighters are persistent,” it said with a British woman's voice. Official First Class Bailey Cheddarwright pushed the knotted rags and imitation leaves out her eyes, showing off her freckles and braided auburn hair. She'd painted long black and olive stripes across her forehead and cheeks, so, along with her Scottish ghillie suit, she'd be able to hide in plain sight from even the most determined searcher. A snarl drew her attention back to the perimeter and she stood, raising her massive English longbow and drawing it back in a single, fluid motion. She released a broadhead arrow and was rewarded with a distant, pained yelp.

“You heard them, boys,” Goldbrick said. “Grand, Lucky, cover the flanks, I'll take our six.”

Lucky scrambled around the crater to cover the northern approach. The soil was still steaming there and it warmed Lucky's purpled abdomen when he went prone. He braced his Garand on the edge and studied the crackling forest. Smoke and flame obscured whatever he might have seen through the drifting ash. Still, he picked out the natural approaches that the fallen trees created, finding choke points he could exploit and determining where an enemy might run for cover.

“I could blast it off,” Lucky heard a man offer. He looked over his shoulder to find Grease tugging at the jammed hatch on the fallen capsule. He wasn't the short, cocky Bronx kid Lucky'd met months back in basic training anymore. Now he was a massive, cocky Bronx kid, pushing seven feet tall after the Romanian's I-soldier surgery grafted the muscles of four men into his body. The armor plates implanted beneath his skin strained against the stitches, staples, and gauze holding him together while he wrenched at the capsule's hatch with all his unfamiliar might.

“Stop that!” Rafael Bastedo snapped. The Frenchman was usually quiet, most comfortable when brooding behind his thick brown beard, so his outburst froze Grease where he stood. Bastedo glared up at the looming commando, his piercing brown eyes boring through Grease's reinforced forehead. The big man let go of the thick hinges and stepped away.

“What?” Grease asked.

“The explosives that should remove the door off are still armed,” Bastedo said.

“Shit,” Grease muttered. He recalled as well as Lucky did the bone-shaking blast that freed him from his steel coffin. If those breaching charges went off while he was anywhere near them, he'd be lucky to just lose a hand. If he was standing near Lucky, he'd like to lose his head. Grease finally noticed Lucky posted up next to him.

“Lucky Ford, as I live and breathe,” he said with a god-awful imitation of a Southern drawl. “So nice of you to join us.”

“It's been too long,” Lucky chuckled. In reality, the DIVERT had only taken an hour from launch to landing, but the journey had felt like days. It had been hot, blistering hot, wool straight jacket on asphalt in August hot. The rocket riding his ass roared louder than a hurricane, and the capsule was dark as the pit inside, lit only by a single red bulb the size of a shooter marble. Hot, dark, deafening: it was concentrated, boiling chaos.

“Could've been longer,” Grease said, pointing at the capsule behind him and the official trapped inside with his thumb. He groaned and settled onto his belly in the dirt next to Lucky. He had his T-33 Stinger machine gun to his shoulder and was watching the same burning treeline that Lucky was.

“What do you have?” Goldbrick asked Bastedo.

“Rien, sir,” the Frenchman replied. He had nothing. His steel-toed boot clanged hard against the cooling capsule while he puffed on a stinking hand-rolled cigarette and assessed the situation. Benjamin banged against the inside of the door. At least he'd wrestled himself free of his harness and was able to move around in there. The only thing worse than being locked in a coffin was being locked in a coffin while strapped to a chair.

“Ten quid says Hall could have cracked this in a second,” Grand said.

“Bucket Hall has his own problems to worry about,” Goldbrick replied. The second team, led by the Colonel and containing Brooklyn's mechanical genius and six other officials, was still in the air, damn near thirty miles up. Their capsules would separate soon, and they'd begin their own freefall, aiming blind for a landing zone miles to the north.

A howl pierced the pre-dawn gloom, joined by others.

“I count seven distinct calls,” Miller said.

“Shouldn't their handlers be on us?” Lucky asked. Whoever had loosed the hounds had to be close.

“These are free-range killers,” Cheddarwright explained. “The jerries let them have the run of a set territory. If they go too far or the krauts want them back, the dogs get a buzz to the brainstem through their antennas. As long as we don't send any home with gunshot wounds, they will assume the missing dogs were caught in the bombardment.”

“I ain't ever killed a dog,” Grease said. He almost set down his machine gun, but a ferocious bark not twenty yards away made him snatch it back up.

“These are monsters,” Goldbrick assured him. “Trained to kill, painfully, for pleasure. The krauts pumped horrible chemicals into them and carved them up. They are in constant agony. They aren't even animals anymore.”

Grease looked down at his massive, stitch-riddled hands and his steel prosthetic leg but said nothing.

“Eyes up!” Grand shouted. He fired his Lee-Enfield rifle into the trees. A dog yelped somewhere out there. Brush crackled in front of Lucky and he squeezed his trigger. Another twig snapped to his right. Grease gritted his teeth and let loose a rip from his machine gun. His rounds went high but the mannesser scampered away nonetheless.

“They are probing our defenses,” Miller reported.

“One to the south!” Cheddarwright shouted. Lucky twisted around to see a beast charging between two leaning oaks, tearing through the underbrush. He fired three times, painting its neck and shoulders red. The creature ignored the injuries and snarled. It went low and then surged forward in a predatory pounce, its vicious jaws wide and teeth bared for the kill.

Cheddarwright stood and loosed an arrow. It hissed through the air as it passed inches from Lucky's right ear to disappear down the mannesser's throat. The beast choked and tumbled in the air, colliding with the lip of the crater a yard to Lucky's left, raising a cloud of dirt and ash. The debris and the dog slid over and downward, boneless. Pink saliva leaked from its open mouth as it died at the base of the capsule.

“Six more,” Cheddarwright said. She already had a fresh arrow nocked.

“Nice shot, Cheese,” Grease said. She shot him a glare that wiped the smirk off his face completely.

The howls came from the north now.

“Green blighters,” Grand said at the sound. “Green and red, like Christmas.”

“What?” Grease whispered. Lucky tapped the back of his helmet, where the huge surgical scar shaped like an inverted 'T' bisected Grand's skull.

“Oh, right,” Grease said. Miller had told them about Grand's condition. He'd taken a head wound from a Luftwaffe shell that had re-wired his brain. He tasted colors, saw sounds, and registered everything his eyes took in as black and white. It was all strange, but so were the rest of the officials.

“What should we do?” Bastedo asked the general. The war dogs howled again, a sound that woke old, animal fear. In Lucky's subconscious mind, these were predators stalking him in the pre-dawn gloom, and he needed to run.

“We neutralize these mutts, then pry that thing open,” Goldbrick said, somehow ignoring his primal instincts. “Miller, we're silkin' 'em.”

Miller dug through his pack for exactly half of a second before retrieving a canister bomb, painted with familiar black and white zigzags. He took the spinnennetz grenade in his throwing hand and cocked it back, pulling the pin to activate it. The general saw he was ready and hissed at Cheddarwright.

“Call 'em.”

The archer lowered her bow and cupped her mouth with her free hand. She made an ululating cry, projecting the strange call into the woods to our north. The mannesser howls stopped dead. Whatever they thought this wail was, they were interested. One of the big dogs barked, and the ravaged forest burst into activity.

The mannessers surged from the smoke in force, a ferocious column of mutated muscle and razored fangs. Miller heaved his grenade. The dogs were on top of it when it blew.

Miller's spinnennetz bomb worked exactly how the SS Department Three had intended it to. The captured munition sprayed millions of strands of chemically-enhanced spiderweb all over the charging dogs. Its threads hardened in an instant and stuck to any surface they contacted. The mannessers were locked into place, suspended in midair like insects waiting to be feasted upon. They struggled and lashed out, but the web had no give. There were ways out, but not for them.

“Good work,” Goldbrick said.

The mutant dogs barked and whimpered. They struggled, snapping at the officials in the hope that they'd get close enough to draw blood. Grease hauled himself out of the crater and approached the writhing mass of legs, teeth, and silk. He leaned in, bringing his own altered face inches away from a slavering dog's. The mannesser lunged at him, coming half-an-inch from biting off his steel-banded nose. Grease stumbled back while Bastedo chuckled. Lucky stood and studied the vicious animals as well.

“Are they blind?” Grease asked. Lucky looked closer. Their eyes were corpse-gray, with no pupils.

“They hunt by scent and sound,” Miller answered. The gas-masked man pushed himself off the ground and tried to adjust his environment suit, tugging at the crotch and armpits. It was a new suit and it didn't quite fit him yet. The last one he'd broken in had been shredded by a mine in Spain. He looked a little closer at the mass of trapped mannessers while he shifted fabric around and froze where he stood.

“There are only four,” he realized. A black shape lunged over the southern lip of the crater and collided with him from behind. His back snapped under the snarling mannesser's weight. He folded over and flopped limp as a dead fish under the dog. The wet pop of separating bone turned Lucky's stomach. He tried to fire at the snarling thing, but a second one lunged. It latched onto his pack and shook him, then threw him across the crater and onto his back. The monster pounced after him, ready to rip ut his throat.

Lucky landed in a heap. His rifle struck a rock and misfired. The airborne mannesser, desperate and furious, evaporated in a roar of flame, metal, and blood.

Lucky's errant bullet collided with one of the DIVERT capsule's breaching charges. The resulting explosion launched the malfunctioning hatch at hundreds of feet-per-second, impacting the howling monster like a manhole cover dropped on a water balloon. It wasn’t hurt, it was simply gone. Less than a second later, Lieutenant Paul Benjamin was free.

Lucky'd only seen Benjamin as an administrator aboard the HMS St. George until that moment. Now, he was a blur of tattoos and scars, swinging a blade in each hand as he collided with the mannesser crushing Miller. The nimble Navy man slashed at tendons and arteries, his knives a tornado of flashing steel. The creature didn't have time to even snap back before Benjamin concluded his assault by drawing reddened steel across its throat. He shoved it to the ground and it died in the dirt.

Its spider-webbed pack-mates snarled and gnashed; the air was thick with blood.

Volcanic winds drew the smoke from the breaching charges away for a few seconds, leaving the rest of the officials staring in shock and confusion. The capsule hatch had landed in the branches of a charred oak a hundred yards away, having crashed through burning trees until it found one it couldn't shatter. Goldbrick was the first to assemble the sequence of events.

“You frog men always know how to break up a party,” he said. Benjamin snorted, the closest he got to laughing. The Navy man wiped the dog's blood off his knives on its own hide, then sheathed his blades. He stepped over Miller's twitching body and hauled himself back into the capsule. He poked his head out a second later with his pack on his back and his carbine strapped across his chest.

“All right, hop to it, Miller,” he said.

Miller groaned by way of a response. He pushed himself up with his arms, twisting around until his chest lined up with his hips and his splayed, limp legs. He seemed to have trouble with the last few inches of rotation. He grunted and pushed harder against the ground until he was rewarded with a nauseating crack: his vertebrae popped back into place. His lifeless legs kicked in response. The intrinsic sapient current running through his body sealed his spine back together in seconds.

By the time the team had dusted themselves off and gathered their gear, Miller was getting to his feet, stretching as he did so. He raised both arms to the sky, extending his mending backbone, then pointed upward. A formation of red stars was twinkling across the lightening sky, visible even through the hanging ash, growing closer with each flash of light.

“The second spearhead,” Goldbrick said. Eight more capsules were falling from the upper atmosphere, the third stage of a seven-hundred-mile, supersonic, rocket-powered journey from the Mediterranean.

They were all there. Two teams of eight, sixteen commandos infiltrating Eberkopf, the stronghold of the July Arm of Department Three. Sixteen officials against the unknown abyssal horrors of the most powerful secret army in the world.

Lucky could barely make out the falling orange stars of the distant capsules though the ashen haze. The eight of them stood for a moment and watched the fiery glow as the the braking rockets slowed them down. They impacted within seconds of each other, each hitting the ground in a bright red flash that lit up the horizon for an instant.

“Peppermint,” Grand whispered.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 13, 1943
ABOARD THE HMS ST. GEORGE
THE SEA OF SARDINIA

The initial engagements of Operation Arm Breaker began on Wednesday morning before dawn, but the planning was underway the second Bucket had taken Werner von Werner's blood-soaked clip board out of Lucky's hands during the escape from Vesuvius. The op was unprecedented: three bureaus, each fully mobilized by the time The Express touched down after its return trip from Spain. This would be the largest field engagement in Office history.

The HMS St. George was buzzing with activity as the modified C-47 Skytrain hit the deck. Within seconds of the landing cable grinding them to a halt, a dozen officials had swarmed aboard. Miller, healed but stuck in his melting tub of dirty ice, was quickly unloaded and carried below. A team of matronly nurses under the direction of the frazzled Doctor Pietrzak set upon Lucky, Grease, and Bucket. They were momentarily stunned by Grease's hulking frame, but in just a few harried minutes all three of them were in the sick bay, staring into harsh, unshielded lights.

The phalanx of steely-eyed harpies pounced upon Lucky with scissors and sliced his ash-fouled clothes off, leaving him nude save for the half-inch of accumulated grime coating his entire body. Grease and Bucket were given the same treatment, their shocked objections falling on the handsy crones' deaf ears.

Then came the water.

The coven of nurses shoved the three of them over a grate and turned on the hose, blasting them with frigid sea water, cold enough to lock Lucky's joints and leave him at their mercy. Whatever dignity he had left after being stripped by the phalanx of women old enough to be his mother peeled away. A mudslide rolled off every inch of his skin until he was left shivering, soaked, and naked.

The nurses shoved Lucky again, this time throwing him onto an examination table. The brushed steel was piercingly cold against his bare back and rear. He half-heartedly tried to cover himself with his hands, but it was far too late to retain any sense of decorum. Lucky could feel his ribs grind as he shivered. The nurses parted and Doctor Piertzak appeared over him. Lucky felt surveyed. The older man was emotionless as granite.

Lucky's entire midsection was a mess of purple and green bruises and ached. The pain came in waves, and one hit after a moment of laying there under the doctor's dispassionate glare. Lucky couldn't help but let out a groan.

“Have quiet,” Doctor Pietrzak said through a thick Polish accent. His eyes were jet black and penetrating, even under his folds of wrinkles and bushy gray eyebrows. He jammed one bony finger into Lucky's side, as if to gauge his pain level by severity of the groan he made. The doctor verified his diagnosis against the medical reports that Angel had radioed ahead from The Express, then set his staff to work:

“Four ribs, three cuts. Cement and string.”

Beyond the doctor, Lucky could see the berths where the other wounded lay. Cão's scarred head poked out from an iron lung, the big gray machine breathing for his dōtanuke-perforated lungs. He'd been conscious only an hour or four since Vesuvius.

Nearby, Achilles Adrastos sat with his twin brother Ajax, writing his words out in Greek for the newly deafened soldier. The two were smiling, glad to be back together, beat up as they were. Achilles' broken leg still had a couple weeks left before he could run on it.

A hatchet-faced nurse appeared at Lucky's side after a minute, holding a tray out to the waiting Pietrzak. A suture needle and thread lay on it next to a caulk-gun-sized syringe.

“You will have discomfort,” the doctor either warned or promised. His bristling thicket of twisted gray hair stuck out in all directions around the straps holding the reflector to his forehead. He pulled hard on a cheap cigarette, burning it halfway down with a single drag. A practiced nurse plucked it from his lips and ashed it into a nearby bed pan. Pietrzak squinted, then lanced into Lucky's side with the wide-bore syringe. Lucky, who’d been recently stabbed, noted a similarity in sensation. He clenched his teeth and tensed his legs.

The glass tube looked like it was packed with sausage gravy. The doctor grunted with the exertion it took to jam the plunger down.

“Osteo-Bond,” Pietrzak muttered, the extent of his explanation.

Lucky struggled against the alien sensation. The Osteo-Bond was cold and horrible and Pietrzak pushed it mercilessly into the crack in Lucky's rib. It felt like the old doctor was packing crunchy peanut butter into the fracture. The nurses held Lucky down as Pietrzak pulled the needle out then crammed it back into his side three more times.

“You wiggle like worm,” the doctor observed, extracting the thick needle and handing the syringe off to one of his nurses. “Cement is setting. Move slow for a few hours.”

Four gray splotches were settling across Lucky’s sides, but before he could say anything the nurses were back on him, pressing him down onto the operating table. Pietrzak mopped the deep stab wound in Lucky’s shoulder with iodine, eliciting a hiss. The nurses held him like they were cast-forged iron. Pietrzak cleaned the fang-induced gashes in Lucky’s shin, next. The needle danced confidently in the doctor's fingers. It took six sutures to close the wound that the Romanian's flung scalpel had left Lucky, and three in his shin. There was a quick snip of thread and some slapped-on bandages before Lucky let his muscles relax. The pressure left him like a deflating balloon.

“Now the back,” Pietrzak grunted.

“What?” Lucky stammered, then he remembered the long slashes the gremlin had left down his back. He twisted into cord wood as the doctor repeated the process with the stinging iodine and piercing needle.

“Done, cry now,” Pietrzak snorted. He left him to work on Bucket.

“You witches!” Bucket was yelling at the nurses. They were attacking his swollen dis- and re-located shoulder with needles full of pain killers. “Get your claws off of - !”

The young sergeant was silenced by the nurses who pinned him down and jammed his mouth open with a pair of wood blocks. They pushed a tongue depressor down his throat and forced him to gag. He vomited into a bowl. Lucky heard the ding of a swallowed tooth against stainless steel. They pulled the tooth from the bile and positioned it over Bucket's mouth as Pietrzak prepared to reattach it with the help of giant syringe of Osteo-Bond. Bucket looked at the vomit-soaked tooth in horror and began struggling against the nurses, spitting as he shouted incomprehensibly.

“Thah ith foul!” he shouted around the blocks.

“Why so loud?” Pietrzak asked, pausing over Bucket, Osteo-Bond in hand.

“At least wash it off!” Lucky shouted across the sick bay. Bucket nodded frantically, pointing at Lucky with a free hand.

“Okay, okay,” the old Polish doctor grumbled. He waved a hand and his nurse turned and put the tooth under a faucet for a second, washing the stink of upchuck off. The doctor was growing impatient as he surveyed Grease from across the room. Lucky's old buddy from the Eighty-Second would be a challenging job for the medical staff and they knew it.

“Good enough,” Pietrzak said, snatching the tooth out of his nurse's hand and shoving into Bucket's mouth. He followed it close by the Osteo-Bond needle, gluing the tooth back into the jawbone. The nurses let Bucket go and the sergeant gingerly removed the wooden blocks from his mouth. The nurses dragged him off the table and shoved him out the door, naked, before he could do anything else.

Lucky tried to ask a question about the stuff that they'd injected into his bones, but he found himself dragged to his feet and rushed out into the hallway, as dripping wet and stark naked as Bucket.

“Wait!” Lucky shouted, one hand covering his front, the other over his backside. An especially haggard nurse poked her head out the door, gave Lucky and Bucket a disconcertingly slow once-over, then threw a couple sets of blue pyjamas onto the hallway floor. The door slammed shut behind her. Lucky snatched up the clothes and tossed Bucket his own pair of trousers. He tried his best to ignore the officials and crewmen walking past them in the hallway as he struggled into his new britches.

“Doc P. may be an ass, but he can put a body back together,” Bucket assured Lucky as he tried to wiggle his tooth. It didn’t budge.

“At least it was quick,” Lucky concurred. He understood, though. The doctor had a lot on his plate. Pietrzak and his half-dozen-strong team of gray-haired nurses took care of the St. George’s entire crew. The doctor also had to do all the bureau's autopsies and medical analysis. That meant he identified the grisly effects of every strange new weapon that the krauts brought against the officials, officials that he had cared for. Lucky didn’t know if he could’ve handled that half as well as the doctor and the nurses did.

“And now you...” Pietrzak said on the other side of the door. His phalanx of nurses were noisy, scrambling for medical supplies as he started rattling off the list of what he'd need to treat Grease: “Bandages, cement, string, staples, antiseptic, anesthetic, scalpel... wrench, screwdriver, bolt-cutters, polish, oil, metal file...”

The old Polish doctor's voice trailed off as Lucky stumbled away. Grease was in good hands, rough as they may be. Each step squished and shifted the odd fluid around his ribs. Bucket gently patted him on the back, saying:

“Let's go see the Snowman.”

He began heading down to Miller's refrigerated quarters. Lucky'd be back to check on Grease, but there wasn't much he could do 'til the doctor had finished his work. He limped along and caught up.

Miller had the only single bunk on the ship other than the Colonel and Commodore Dixon, but even theirs couldn't compare to his. Miller's quarters was kept a hair above freezing at all times, making it the only place on board that he could be without his environment suit.

Bucket led Lucky down two decks down and halfway to the stern before they found Miller's frost-coated door. The iron claw-foot tub sat abandoned in the hallway, half-full of the dirty melt-water that had kept his body temperature down during the flight from Spain. Bucket knocked on the door. The insulated hatch creaked open, belching a cloud of freezing water vapor into the hallway. It was not Miller who answered, but a massive Canadian whose bulk filled the entire doorway.

“It'll be a tick,” Woody told them. Steam rose off his big bald head in waves around his tiny tanker beret. He'd been in the room so long that frost had collected on his black eye patch and in his thick beard.

“Who is it, Chief Woodruff?” Miller asked from inside.

“Just Hall and Ford, and they're leaving,” Woody answered over his shoulder. It was odd for them to see the armorer-quartermaster without his usual grin. He must have been more worried about Miller than Lucky thought.

“By all means, chief, let them in!” Miller called from inside the room.

“Fine, fine,” grumbled Woody. He leaned in close and whispered to Bucket and Lucky. “No matter what it seems, he is not unbreakable.”

The old armorer glared at them until they both nodded, then stepped aside just enough to let them squeeze by. The man was sixty but built like a Churchill tank, so when they squirmed by him they each had to stare in his good eye and nod again. He followed them in and sealed the hatch to keep the cold in.

Miller was busy adjusting the leather straps on the rubber mask of his new environment suit when they came in. The room was as cold as Jonesboro in January and everyone but Miller's breath came in puffs of white in the freezing cabin. He adjusted the mask slightly, then winked at his visitors as he screwed a canister filter onto the left side of his face.

With the filter attached, the environment suit's final piece camouflaging it as a regular uniform and gas mask was in place. Anyone but an official would simply assume he was any other Tommy, though even the most paranoid civilians hadn't blown the dust off their gas masks since the Blitz. Miller smiled, his bright blue eyes shining behind glass lenses.

“Private Ford, Sergeant Hall, thank you for coming for a visit. How is Private Benolli?” Miller asked. He stretched in his new suit, then winced and adjusted a couple places that were pinching.

“Grease is just fine, long as the doctor keeps him in one piece,” Lucky said. The cold Osteo-Bond squished uncomfortably under his skin when he spoke.

“How about you?” Bucket asked, “You put back together?”

“One hundred percent recovered, sergeant. However, these new environment suits are always a bit tight in... discrete areas,” Miller told them. He turned away to shift around the crotch and armpits of the suit, adding: “Until it is worn in, there is much... chafing.”

Bucket and Lucky suddenly found interesting things to look at on the floor while Miller wiggled around in his suit. His quarters looked more like an office than a bunk room. There was no bed, for one thing, but then again, Miller didn’t sleep. There was a desk, mountains of papers, file folders, and books, a chair, a footlocker, and a coat rack with Miller’s steel pot helmet on top. A painted beach, sunny and blue, a tourism poster for Hawai’i, was taped to the wall above the desk.

“Our boy looks sharp as a tack!” Woody said, clapping them both hard on the back. Lucky could feel loose ribs bounce around inside his chest. Woody boomed, proud of the suit: “That outfit has double-stitched, reinforced seams sealed with elasto-silicone polymers, tear-proof carbon-threaded fabric, and finally, non-flammable asbestos insulation.”

“Finally non-flammable indeed,” muttered Miller.

“What's that, friend?” Woody asked.

“Nothing, chief, however it is time we get down to the mess hall for briefing, I'm sure Brigadier General Stephens and the Western European Bureau have finished boarding, and Colonel Halistone is eager to get us up to speed.”

Miller tightened the last of his straps, picked up the top stack of files, then wrenched the door open and walked out. Bucket and Lucky followed him into the warm hallway. Woody slammed the thick steel hatch shut then grabbed the pair on their shoulders to hold them up for a second.

“The old boy's been on board for under an hour and he's already more on top of it than I am,” Woody whispered. Once Miller was around the corner, Woody's voice twisted into something almost threatening.

“You two better listen,” he hissed, “Take care of him. He'll never ask for it, but he needs protection as much as the rest of us. He may be different, but he's still one of us.”

“Of course,” Lucky said, to which Woody slapped his back again, giving him another rib-shifting jolt.

“Good to hear,” Woody said. “Now get down to the mess, Goldbrick Stephens makes Whiskey Dixon look patient as a nun if you arrive late to one of his briefings.”

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.