The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden, Part 1 of 12

Introducing Lucky Ford, an American paratrooper who signed up to do his part in the fight against fascism. He thought parachuting into Sicily and fighting the Axis would be the most dangerous part of his day, but little did he know that creatures and weapons he could’ve never imagined would be waiting for him there.

The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, or as a DRM-free ePub!

Content Warnings: Violence, Gun Violence, Death, Gore, Tobacco Use, Nazis

FRIDAY NIGHT, JULY 9, 1943
AN UNIDENTIFIED VALLEY
THE ISLAND OF SICILY

The summer moon was so bright that Lucky could’ve pulled himself out of the wreckage even without the orange flicker of ignited aviation fuel.

Once free, he took a deep breath. The air was anything but refreshing: smoke from the blazing southern horizon rasped every breath, and distant explosions rumbled on the wind as loud as trains banging together in a switchyard. He stared at his plane as he pulled himself together. There were ten bodies wrapped up in its twisted fuselage; two pilots, one lieutenant, and seven enlisted men. All good men.

“We landed off the map, boys,” Sergeant Burke was saying. The dozen survivors had gathered up on him. Every one of them was banged up and their radios were somewhere in the burning plane. “The way I figure it, we were at least thirty miles off course before we took flak. That puts us in right in Benito’s lap, in the middle of who-knows-where.”

It made sense to Lucky. Before the engine went, they’d been hit with choppy winds and the navigator, Lucky couldn't remember his name, kept saying that his instruments were off. The compass was spinning like a roulette wheel, the altimeter was bouncing between zero and thirty thousand. Hell, speedometer said their airspeed was zero, and the level claimed they were upside-down. They had been were assigned to hit a Sicilian garrison town, Ragusa, but no one had any idea where they had actually ended up.

All Lucky knew for sure is that the flak had caught them real good. They found their starboard engine explosively disassembled before they realized they were under fire. The pilot tried his best to keep them in the air but they lost altitude too fast for any bail-out attempts. He managed to skip the plane off the down slope of the valley rather than going in nose-first, but the landscape was dotted with Sicilian oaks that stood older and stronger than canvas and aluminum. That fast, stopping a C-47 was like catching an egg with a shovel. One mighty tree, burled and monolithic, caved the whole flight cabin in on both pilots, killing the pair instantly. The rest of the chalk was thrown around like jumping beans, but those that survived were able to walk off on our own.

O’Hare shook Lucky back to reality, his head was aching like it was on the wrong end of a stampede. His recollection of the crash came back to him like frames in a burning film strip.

The engine blasts away out of nowhere and Wilson’s dead, reduced to liquid and nothing. Most of him gets sucked out of the roaring hole left by the shrapnel.

Lucky holds onto the strap above his head with everything he’s got. He’s covered in red. All of his knuckles pop at once while his shoulder screams.

His head dings around inside his helmet like the last pea in the can.

That crazy jackass Jonesy loses it, screaming like a maniac.

The plane roars into its death dive.

Just images, silent movie scenes playing back black and white in Lucky’s head, come back to him one-by-one. O’Hare helped Lucky sit himself at the foot of a swaying tree for a breather. He could feel blood on his face, dry and crusting over, but it wasn't his. More images come back to him:

The flak pops the engine, rippling the flight deck like a sheet in the breeze.

That asshole Jonesy, who didn't do a damn thing but stare out the window the whole flight, starts screaming about boo hags and gremlins and tries to shoot out the glass. Last thing anyone needs in a plane crash is somebody popping off gunshots inside the cabin. The lieutenant and Sergeant Burke disarm him and clock him in the jaw for good measure, dropping him to the deck as the plane fell.

Another bursting shell buckles the bulkhead into the plane, right where Jonesy would have been standing had be not been knocked on his can. The lieutenant takes the full force of the impact instead. His neck snaps then and there.

It wasn't the first time Jonesy had seen things or heard things. The apparition he claimed was chewing on the engine was no different than the time he thought the barracks cat was whispering to him. He started yelling the same load of bullshit he always did: 'Krauts even got the animals on their side!' He also went with the exact same solution then: blasting away with his Garand. Everyone knew Jonesy was off his rocker, but no one thought he was that crazy.

Jonesy was a lousy shot, and Poppins managed to get out of there. They never saw the cat again.

Lucky had been hooked on the same line Jonesy was. He didn’t see anything other than the entire starboard engine shatter off the wing. It had been a hell of a shot too, because the engine just blew: no flak, no near-misses, no warning, it just burst. Part of the prop went right through the fuselage and got Wilson. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth.

Boom, shrapnel punches through one cabin wall, through Wilson, then the shrapnel and the Iowan fly through the other side of the plane and out in the sky.

Next thing Lucky knows, he's covered in Wilson, Sergeant Burke is cold-cocking Jonesy just to get him to stop screaming about how they couldn't hope to fight the krauts, and the plane’s dropping, a lone flicked cigarette trailing sparks and smoke as it falls to the ground.

“Sweet Mary, Ford. ‘Lucky’ is damn straight the right for name for you,” Grease said, his mouth smacking as he worked on a wad of chewing gum. Lucky shook his head out of the memory. Grease kept yapping:

“That prop cut through the cabin like a buzz-saw. I swear, Wilson was not two feet in front of your face. Goddamn 'Lucky' is right.”

Grease was their point man, a loud and proud New Yorker who made up for his big mouth with his eyes and ears. Lucky didn't usually mind his jack-jawing, but that night it hit hard.

“Hey, cut it out for a minute,” Lucky muttered.

“Yeah, sure thing,” Grease said. He ambled on to bug someone else.

Nobody but the L.T. knew that Wilson had the jitters for that jump. Lucky’d traded places with him so Wilson could follow him out the door. He had missed that shrapnel missed that prop by much less than Grease thought.

Lucky watched Grease pal around with Doc and Squints. They’d lost friends not twenty minutes ago, but he managed to get them to crack the smallest smiles. Marco Benolli was a good guy and a funny guy and he had his ways, so not ten minutes after dragging himself out of burning wreckage he had all his usual accessories: a lit cigarette, a straight comb, the can of oily pomade for slicking back his hair that earned him his nickname, and a flapping jaw.

Despite his quirks, Grease was the best point man in the Eighty-Second and Sergeant Burke figured that if all it took to keep Grease happy was putting up with a little tongue wagging, he didn’t have a problem. For a kid raised in the middle of the Bronx, Grease loved being in the field; he was always a hundred percent aware of everything going on around them. He was meant to be stomping through brambles and crawling through mud, despite his city swagger.

Grease was all smiles, pointing at Lucky while he talked to Doc:

“I ever tell you that our very own Lucky Ford looks exactly like this cop I know back home?”

He had, but he kept going.

“Yeah, he had that same mop of hair, sticking out every which way. Well this cop, he liked to write bullshit tickets, you know? And conveniently enough, he’d let you pay them directly to him, at a steep discount even!”

Lucky hadn't told Grease that his dad had been the county sheriff 'til the cancer got him. After that, Lucky’d gotten a badge of his own, fully deputized for a couple years. He learned the job, but it hadn’t felt right. The war came along at the perfect time for him to not have to figure out what he actually wanted.

Grease continued:

“So this cop, turns out he had a soft spot for Dodgers fans. Unfortunately for him, that soft spot was right on top of his fat head. He tried to hustle the wrong guy and wound up getting dinged with a Louisville slugger. Goes to show ya.”

“‘Goes to show ya’ what?” Doc asked.

“Huh?” Grease said. He wasn’t used to people listening to his ramblings all the way through.

“What does this dirty cop getting his head bashed show ya?”

“Oh, well, don’t be a dirty cop, I guess.”

Lucky chuckled. He’d known lazy cops and bad cops, but never a dirty one. When the sheriff was alive, he ran a tight ship. He was all about duty. He’d been kicking over ‘shine stills ‘til the day he died. Then Lucky’d become to man of the house with all he had to remember the sheriff by being the silver cross the mortician had pulled off his neck.

“Okay, there we go, Lucky,” Grease said. “You’re still alive. Live it.”

His squad had given him that name, Lucky. Everybody back home called him Lloyd. It was too short a name to give a nickname to. The Eighty-Second had given him his first one. Even though he didn’t like it, he was proud to wear it.

He didn’t feel like a Lucky. He was born the youngest of four. Now he was the last one left. Cancer took the sheriff, the train at Little Falls took his mom, and fire and flu had gotten the rest. He’d meandered around town for a while after his mom passed, and he tried to find something to occupy himself.

The new sheriff had given Ford a shot as a deputy for a couple years, but Jonesville got a little smaller every day, tightening like a noose until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Open fields, gas wells, memory-haunted houses and graveyards closed in. By the time the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor out there in Hawaii, Lucky got the feeling that his county didn't need him as much as his country did.

Lucky’d puttered around for a while, thinking and re-thinking it all. He had been a 2-A, exempted from the draft because he was a deputy, so they weren't coming for him, he had to go to them. One morning he caught the train to Indianapolis two signed forms later he was in Camp Claiborne, helping birth the first American airborne infantry division.

Since then, the only name he’d known was Lucky’d. Lloyd had stayed in Jonesville. His luck had followed.

Even in training, he always managed to away while someone else took the hit. An accidental discharge in rifle training should have scooped out his melon. Instead, it ricocheted off his steel pot and damn-near took off his drill sergeant’s arm. That’s when it started. Grease was the first one to call that, and it circulated the company in the way that only gossip among infantrymen can.

Lucky hated the nickname, but he loved having it. Lucky walked while someone else got his trouble on their plate. Just like with Wilson.

“We cannot leave them here,” Rodriguez said. Lucky forced himself to his feet.

“I don’t want to, either, but we can’t stay that long,” Sergeant Burke told him. “I’m writing down where we crashed, best as I can. We’ll be back for them.”

“There are ten dead men in there, sergeant,” Rodriguez objected.

“Whoever shot us saw us go down, and you can bet your sweet Aunt Sally that they’re on their way here. The plane’s burning like a goddamn signal fire,” Burke said. “If we don’t move soon, there’s going to be a lot more than ten bodies around here, got me?”

No one wanted to argue, that all knew a horde of Italians had to be surrounding them as they sat. Sergeant Burke continued:

“I saw an encampment just north of here in the valley, a fuel depot maybe. Our radio’s out, we’re lost behind enemy lines, so the least we can do is put up a good fight, maybe take a few of those fascist bastards with us. Who knows, we might be able to figure out where the hell we are and link up with the rest of the company.”

The last radio report they'd heard was that platoons were spread across all of southern Sicily. Heavy winds, rushed preparation, and friendly anti-aircraft fire had snared everything up. Planes were dumping their soldiers in the ocean out there. Lucky's situation, lost behind lines, didn't carry water compared to what the other All-Americans were going through.

Besides, no matter where they were in Sicily, a dozen men from the Eighty-Second could do a lot of damage.

This had been the Eighty-Second’s first combat jump. Command called it Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Allied feet on Axis home territory. Resistance was expected, but once the nut was cracked, the whole island would fold.

Command figured the Germans would try to pull out once they got their noses bloodied. They expected enlisted Italians to surrender and their officers to mutiny. But that all depended on hitting ‘em hard and fast enough to convince them that one island wasn’t worth the fight.

With Lucky's squad and so many others fouled up, they could only hope that enough paratroopers touched down in the right spots to clear the beaches for the incoming amphibious forces. Lucky was sure Sergeant Burke had an idea of a way they could help, even if it wasn’t how they’d planned to.

“Gather your gear, lock and load. Grease in on point, we’re heading north in five,” the sergeant ordered.

Grease was a natural, leading them through the dense undergrowth, staying off the road. Richardson, he claimed he was half Cherokee, swept up the end of their line, just in case the Italians had any idea how to track. Lucky stuck close to the head of the line and the rest held down the middle, watching the trees and distant ridges.

Jonesy hadn’t said a word about gremlins or anything else since he'd come to, just nursed his jaw and never once set down his rifle. The crazy fool should have been thankful that the L.T. had him knocked out; instead, he just kept cursing below his breath, stealing hateful glances at Burke, the new man in charge.

Everyone else, save Grease, walked in silence, but even he knew to shut up whenever a truck drove past the edge of the woods. None of the headlights ever stopped.

Grease kept up morale with jokes, but the further they got into enemy territory, the fewer laughs he got until he was just talking to the wind.

“Any of you guys left back there?” he whispered. “It’s like you all just crashed an airplane or something. Parker, you dago sumbitch, I know you’re still alive, how’s it feel to be back in the homeland, Mama Italia?”

Tony Parker didn’t say anything. He was a first generation American, his parents both Italian immigrants who left their real last name on a boat. Parker spoke fluent German and Italian, a college kid studying the Romance languages. Grease liked to say he and Parker bonded over spaghetti and marinara, but other than heritage, those two didn’t have much to talk about. Parker remained silent, keeping his eyes on the dark woods around them.

“Nothing out of the local kid then. How about the altar boys? Rodriguez, O’Hare? Got any insight from on high to help us out here?” They stayed quiet, alert. “Nothing for me from the big guy? Oh well, I wasn’t expecting too much help anyway.”

Grease, a Catholic himself, had always ribbed O’Hare and Rodriguez for their faith. It had gotten worse lately, but Grease never acknowledged it.

Rodriguez was a Mexican farmer’s son from southwest Texas, and O’Hare, a Boston welder. The pair had little in common beyond their Bibles, but they became fast friends because of it and were near-inseparable.

“Who else is still dragging along back there? Is that Smith I hear clumping along like a circus bear? Holding up okay, buddy?” Smith was a hick Virginia kid who told the recruiter he was eighteen. He’d lived rough and looked like he was thirty despite only being sixteen. Smith heard his name and nodded vigorously. Grease had taken the pudgy boy under his wing, but the kid, for all his heart, was a slow learner.

“Good to hear. Just stick close and keep up, we’ll get you through this,” Grease said.

Lucky knew Smith was grinning like an idiot, he didn't even have to look at him. The kid idolized Grease and tried his best to emulate him, down to the smoking and hairstyle.

“Of course there's still our very own Andy Oakley over here, Squints himself, and the big men. Burton, Richardson, you bozos got my ass covered?” Burton, their BAR man, shifted his heavy weapon to his left shoulder. Squints, the marksman with his scoped Springfield, didn’t offer a response, and Richardson simply grunted in acknowledgment. “Inspirational input as always, gentleman. Jonesy, you look like somebody pissed in your lemonade, don't get me started with you. And, of course, fearless leaders, anything to add?”

Jonesy rubbed his jaw and muttered some kind of rant that ended in the word 'futile,' while Doc, the medic and occasional amateur Freudian therapist, glared and flipped Grease a gesture indicating that he knew somewhere Grease could go. Doc had cracked his jaw during the crash and now had a mile of bandages wrapped around his head, immobilizing it and silencing him. The sergeant spat his dip into the dirt and kept watch, content to let Grease yammer.

“It’s all you, Grease,” Burke said. The sergeant wasn’t much of a talker, so Grease didn’t push him, and hell, nobody ever talked to Jonesy, even before his outburst in the air. All that nut ever talked about was how America should be using some of the krauts' ideas, and not one of his squad mates wanted any part in that conversation.

“You know it, boss. Me and Lucky here can hold down point. I tell you what, I’m just going to go and stand behind this guy. I swear, Ford’s got the good Lord’s right ear, and long as I’m ducking in his shadow, I bet I got me a bullet-proof guardian angel all the way up this valley. I’ll tell you what Sarge, I seen Lucky Ford here walk barefoot through minefields and take naked naps in rusty barbed wire. Our very own lucky charm over here, boss.”

“What have I told you about watching me sleep? And how'd you get me naked?” Lucky wondered. The rest of the squad snickered.

Grease opened his trap to talk more nonsense, but instead he clapped it shut, raised a clenched fist, and dropped to one knee. His eyes were set dead ahead.

The whole squad stopped and got down, muscle memory from their weeks of training. Grease turned around and pointed to the sky behind them. A faint, distant buzz came through the sparse canopy.

“It’s one of ours, C-47, low from the south,” Grease hissed. The only things he exercised more than his mouth were his eyes and ears. When the plane came into view, they knew the silhouette right away: a friendly. The Skytrain passed slow and low over their position.

Not three hundred yards away, beyond the trees, a flak battery roared to life.

Lucky dropped to his belly and hugged the ground.

Twin white spotlight beams illuminated the plane. Red hot tracer fire and the fat black shells of an eighty-eight millimeter FlaK 37, a devastating anti-air cannon, followed the beams' path, cutting into the C-47's soft belly. The plane burst, flames and bodies erupting into the dark sky. Fire ate through the fuselage mercilessly, reaching the flight cabin in an instant and devouring the craft in a spectacular blast.

No ‘chutes opened.

“That’s twenty more brothers dead,” Burke said. Lucky knew it. Twenty more lives torn apart by scalding metal in the cold sky.

“That's where we're needed, gentlemen,” Sergeant Burke said.

They watched the glowing comets of debris fall to the ground.

“Grease, circle us around east of that emplacement. Boys, these Italians don’t have the stones to face the American paratrooper on the ground. We will not lose another plane, we will not lose any more brothers tonight.”

They needed no discussion. Burke and Grease sprinted east to flank the battery and the squad followed as fast as they could. More friendly planes, low and slow, were already approaching quickly from the south, unknowingly lumbering into a deadly trap.

SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 10, 1943
AN UNIDENTIFIED VALLEY
THE ISLAND OF SICILY

The helpless C-47's reached the edge of the flak battery’s range just as the squad got into position. Lucky counted three machine gun emplacements, their crews staring up into the starry killing field. The MG 42's were stationed equidistant around the emplacement, guarding the command post, armory, and barracks that serviced the massive FlaK 37 and two spotlights in the center. The big gun was waiting like a crouched wolf, ready to pounce upon the lumbering transport planes.

The Italians had cleared the forest about fifty yards out, but this far back from the Allied landings in the south and with their only expected enemies above, their perimeter was lax. They were content to let their packed earth barricade and the snarls of barbed wire atop it handle most of their defense. Lucky and Grease were able to move within twenty yards of the Italian perimeter and hide in the tall grass undetected.

The first C-47, lost, flying slow and low, stumbled across the clearing from the south. The dark and silent emplacement suddenly burst into explosive action. All three machine guns opened up, tracers spitting death into the air, and twin ten-thousand-candlepower spotlights flared to blinding life.

The FlaK 37 cranked into position and blasted upward, bursting a cloud of shrapnel directly in front of the unarmed plane. The Italian crew quickly popped out the still-smoking shell and reloaded, took aim, and fired another near miss in less than four seconds. Even from the ground Lucky could see the plane quaking under the barrage of machine gun fire and hot flak.

As the FlaK crew slid a third round into the chamber, Squints and Richardson fired from their positions in the treeline. The brilliant spotlights popped in a blinding flash and searing shower of glass, sending screaming Italian crewmen bloody to the ground. O’Hare, Grease, and Lucky simultaneously lobbed grenades into each of the machine gun nests. Gunners and loaders, still confused by the sudden darkness, were blown into the air, blood painting their mangled heavy weapons.

“Move, you animals!” Sergeant Burke roared. He jumped to his feet and charged the remaining Italians, firing his Thompson into a terrified rifleman. Lucky pushed himself out of the dirt and followed Burke's lead, Garand barking in his hand, blackened bayonet lit by muzzle flashes. Grease and O’Hare’s group jumped the embankment at the far side, yelling and firing. Lucky found himself airborne, leaping through barbed wire and baseball-sliding down the packed earth.

Smith and Parker snapped off shots past Lucky, targeting the flak cannon's scrambling crew A bullet kicked back the gunner’s head and dropped him to the dirt. The loader ducked behind a sandbag and aimed a machine pistol at the oncoming paratroopers. Lucky managed to plug him. He was still moving, but with that much red pouring out he had bigger problems than three Americans.

Parker and Lucky led Smith past the big gun, heading for the furthest building in the compound. They’d made it halfway there when a rattle of fire raked past them, stitching into Smith where he stood. Lucky and Parker dove to the ground.

The kid dropped to his knees before four more rounds plugged him in the chest. He barely got out a gurgle before he died. The man Lucky’d left alive brought his still-smoking gun around and settled his sights on Parker.

A single muzzle flash winked from the treeline. Air cracked as one of Squints' rounds passed over Lucky's head. The firing Italian was gone in a quick red splash.

Lucky looked at Smith's still body, then at Parker. He didn’t realize what Lucky had done, why Smith was dead.

“Get up,” he urged. “Smith’s had all the time in the world now. We have to keep moving.”

They pushed themselves off the ground and bolted to the nearest building, their objective: the wooden two-story on the left that Sergeant Burke had figured was the command post by its giant radio antenna. Lucky shattered a first-floor window, then Parker pulled a grenade’s pin, counted to three, and tossed it in.

Panicked men scrambled inside, only to be silenced by thunder, flame, and shrapnel when the grenade went off. The blast echoed up the valley, followed by silence within the building. Parker kicked the door the rest of the way off its hinges to let Lucky storm in, popping off rounds. Moaning, crawling shapes greeted him. He plugged shadow after shadow as the dust and splinters from the grenade settled. These ones wouldn’t be shooting anyone in the back.

Burke rushed through the door next and ran upstairs, Parker and Lucky tight on his six. They found a dark hallway with three rooms; each quiet, dark, ominous. They advanced, silent and cautious. The grenade-battered floor held firm.

Sergeant Burke and Parker cleared the two nearest rooms, both empty bunk rooms, while Lucky covered the hall with his still-smoking Garand. Burke and Parker rejoined him so the three of them could creep to the last room. A faint light escaped beneath the door. Lucky inched up until he was close enough to hear hear a voice, a German, and radio static.

“Somebody’s speaking kraut in here, Sarge,” he whispered.

“Parker, check it out,” Sergeant Burke ordered.

Lucky stood aside as Parker crept to his place in front of the door to press his ear against its rough wood. He listened for a moment, then inched back to whisper to the sergeant.

“He’s calling headquarters, telling them we’re here. We got to get him now,” he hissed. Parker stepped back from the door, ready to kick it in. He eased back to get in a good door-kicking position. The floor creaked under his boot.

The door splintered outward under a barrage of automatic fire. Parker went down, clutching his neck. He gasped as scarlet bubbles gurgled between his fingers.

Lucky grabbed Parker and dragged him into one of the side rooms while Sergeant Burke unloaded his Tommy gun through what was left of the door, sawing it damn-near in half in a hail of .45-cal rounds. He held the trigger until it clicked empty. Lucky covered him with his rifle as he tossed the empty Thompson aside and drew his pistol.

Sergeant Burke leveled his Colt 1911, then nodded at Lucky. They rushed the mangled door together, kicking to pieces as they stormed the room.

They found a black-uniformed man was sitting on the floor, propped up against a sparking, perforated radio console. His blood was leaking from a dozen wounds, and a spent MP-40 lay just out of his reach. His gray eyes burned with intensity and his skin was white as a sheet with bright blue veins pulsing weakly beneath. He looked like he was dead already, pale and hairless as a drowned pig.

The radio behind him crackled a response to his report:

“Ein besondere ablösung des Vargulf Korps ist auf dem weg. Halten sie ihre position, Kommandant.”

This made the bleeding Nazi smile, his grin matching that of the haloed skull emblem pinned on his black collar. Lucky couldn't understand a single word that hissed out of the blood-spattered radio, but the look on the dying Nazi's face etched the sounds into his memory:

“Die Wölfe der Hölle wird blut trinken heute abend, Amerikaner,” he hissed. He laughed before coughing up blood. Red oozed between his white teeth. The Nazi pawed at the empty machine pistol that laid beside him on the floor.

“He’s SS,” Lucky whispered to Sergeant Burke, who only nodded, never breaking eye contact with the dying kraut.

Outside, the gunfire died down to nothing. Wind whistled through the bullet-shattered window, the only sound other than Parker, gasping on the floor.

Lucky went to his side and took his hand; it was warm but limp. Parker tried to talk, but only gurgling bubbles formed in his ruined throat. He wore a mask of perfect terror as he stared at the fallen SS soldier, like the Nazi’s words had affected him more than his bullets had.

The German, ghost-white face stained with his own blood, caught Parker’s gaze and started laughing again. Sergeant Burke, disgusted, turned his back on the bloody kraut to see if there was anything he could do for Parker. As soon as he did, the Nazi removed a spherical glass jar from his pocket, no larger than a baseball.

“Hey!” Lucky objected.

The German reached across his body and gripped a leather strap attached to the top of the small globe. Burke's attention swung back to the albino Nazi in time to see his blueish lips contort into one last cruel smile as he yanked the strap out of the glass ball. Sergeant Burke fired his 1911 from the hip, but the bullet that cored the kraut's head came too late to stop whatever he was doing. The orb rolled out of the dead German’s hand and stopped at Burke’s feet.

A mechanical thrum emanated from inside the small sphere as a tiny, faint blue star glowed to life within its weird mechanisms.

“What is that?” Lucky wondered, somehow more curious than terrified.

“Get out of here, now. I’ll get Parker,” Sergeant Burke ordered. He dragged Lucky to his feet and pushed him toward the stairs. “Now, Ford. Take this and get moving. Don’t let anything slow us down.”

Burke shoved his heavy Colt pistol into Lucky's hands as the light inside the glass ball grew more intense, bright as a lightbulb already. The sergeant kicked it back into the room and into the lap of the dead Nazi, then bent to scoop up Parker.

The light from the sphere was intensifying by the second, a spotlight coalesced into an area the size of a fist, silhouetting the sergeant with Parker hanging limp in his arms. Beams of blue light cut between the flooring and shutters of the radio room. Lucky ran ahead to kick tables, chairs, and surviving Italians out of Burke’s path.

Sergeant Burke and Parker were down the stairs, and Lucky was halfway out the front door, when the miniature sun blinked off. Burke stopped to look up at the ceiling where the light had been shining between the floorboards. There was a moment of silence. Lucky turned to look back at Sergeant Burke, blood-drenched and holding Parker.

Then the command post was consumed.

A flash of light, brighter than lightning, enveloped the entire building in a blinding flare, followed by a deafening thunderclap. The concussion of expanding, out-rushing air slammed into Lucky like a freight train, launching him from the open doorway. He landed in the grass ten yards away as a gale of howled over his head.

The old wood of the house cracked and buckled, aging before his eyes. Its remaining windows flexed and shattered, metal fused and rusted, paint curled and blackened. It was like a massive and unrelenting fire was ravaging the building, though no flames burst forth, like the whole house was inside a giant kiln. The air grew hazy and boiled, the heat stung Lucky's eyes, the earth dried out and grass cracked.

As quickly as it erupted forth, the heat dissipated and cool air breezed past as it was sucked back into the house.

It took Lucky a minute to move again, and a few more minutes to speak. He had no words for what he had just seen, so speaking wasn’t a priority. He barely noticed Grease drag him to his feet.

“What the hell was that?” Grease shouted. His voice was flat and distant as he motioned at the circle of death that lay around the house.

Every blade of grass in a twenty-foot radius was brown, dried-out, and dead. A gentle breeze blew gray dust into spinning eddies in the air, gray dust that had been soft, dark earth moments before. Lucky's squad gathered around him, but not one of them dared to cross that ashen line.

Grease was never was one to let the fear of God keep him too quiet. He kept ranting, growing louder word-by-word until Lucky's hearing returned in full.

“I have never seen anything like that, not anywhere, not ever,” Grease was saying. Suddenly he stopped, concern overtaking awe. He asked: “ Lucky, where’s the sarge?”

Lucky couldn’t speak yet, he could only point to the dark doorway he'd been launched from. Everyone stared at the now-dark building, its newly bleached and tattered flags hanging limp, its busted windows and warped wood yawning like a monstrous face. Dead grass crackled under boots.

“How ‘bout that?” Jonesy whispered.

The rest of the squad watched as he took another step toward the ruined structure, grass again crunching beneath his boots. He was at the door before Lucky started to follow him, with Grease, Doc, and the two chest-crossing Catholics not far behind.

Jonesy slipped into the shadow of the doorway, and Lucky was right behind him. Lucky's boots crunched something louder and bigger than fried grass hidden in the shadow, and his eyes took a second to adjust. He was standing in the crushed, dehydrated chest cavity of a human corpse. The body was hollowed out, filled with dust, its paper-thin translucent skin stretched across brittle yellow bones. The dead Italian's dog tags were melted onto his collarbone, his gray uniform reduced to tatters, wrapped ragged over what remained of his body. The other victims of Parker’s grenade attack were spread around him, their bodies in the same condition. Then he saw Sergeant Burke.

The sergeant stood frozen at the bottom of the stairs, Parker still in his arms, exactly where Lucky had seen him last; a macabre statue. His mouth hung open, showing his exposed tongue shriveled into his throat like a worm left on hot asphalt. Burke's skin was shrunk tight around his head, nothing but a skull wrapped in old leather now, a baseball a hundred games too old, brown and splitting at the seams. Parker was just an armful of bones wrapped in translucent skin and faded green fatigues.

Jonesy, the crazy bastard, stood before them, staring into the sergeant's wide and dry eye sockets, looking deep into the little brown raisins nestled within. Silent but gleeful, he reached forward, his hand closing around the fused dog tags melted onto Burke’s neck. Jonesy yanked downward sharply and the sergeant shattered, his desiccated body crumbling to the ground in a cloud of stinking, sticky dust.

Jonesy looked down to the pile of bones and fabric, saying: “Knew we shouldn't have fought these guys...”

He sounded amused, maybe curious. He brushed ashes off his shirt as he turned right into Lucky's punch. His skull bounced when it hit the blackened wood floor, blood flowing from his nose, his eyes rolling back into his head. Lucky's knuckles stung, and he shook them out as he snatched Sergeant Burke’s melted dog tags out of Jonesy's hand.

Grease stood in the doorway, silent for once. O’Hare and Rodriguez prayed, Burton vomited, Doc checked on Jonesy, and Squints and Richardson just stared.

A creak reverberated through the warped ceiling, and somewhere a support beam splintered, waking everyone from the terrifying stupor induced by the desiccated corpses.

“This old boy’s coming down, time to move!” Grease shouted. He pushed the Catholics out the door and Lucky rushed after him, dragging Jonesy with Doc. More weakened joists shattered under the strain of the sagging second floor, showering them all with brittle splinters. Lucky and the eight surviving paratroopers watched in silence as the whole building collapsed into itself.

It felt like a long while before anyone spoke up, and of course it had to be Grease. The others hadn’t found words yet, but they were ready to listen.

“What the hell happened in there, Lucky? What could do that?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know, it happened so fast,” Lucky told them.

That was mostly true, he really didn’t know how it happened. What Lucky did know was that the SS was involved, and that the glass device that had done all this was one of their weapons. Lucky also knew that that wasn’t what they needed to be afraid of.

He took a deep breath, then told them the deal:

“Their commander got off a call for reinforcements before Sergeant Burke plugged him. They know we’re here, and they are coming.”

“What do we do?” It was Burton this time.

Everyone looked to Lucky even Doc, Grease, and Richardson. He didn’t know what they wanted from him, but he knew what Sergeant Burke would’ve wanted from them.

“We put up a hell of a fight, that’s what we do. Our best hope is to hold out and to set off enough fireworks that the rest of the Eighty-Second has to come around just to see where the party is,” Lucky told them. He hoped the bravado he'd conjured up measured half of what Burke’s would've been.

They nodded, it made sense.

Lucky didn’t have the heart to tell them about all of the things that didn't make sense. About the alien German officer, one of Hitler’s elite SS troops, with his corpse-like flesh, inhuman gray eyes, and seething malice. And he sure as hell didn’t have the guts to try to explain that last look of horror in Parker’s eyes. The Nazi’s last words had awoken something so horrifying in Parker that he’d forgotten that he had hot lead lodged in his neck.

“Die Wölfe der Hölle wird blut heute abend trinken, Amerikaner,” Lucky whispered to himself. He didn’t know their meaning, but he’d never forget the words.

It was times like these that Lucky wished he'd brushed up on his German during the boat ride over.

---

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Copyright © 2022 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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