Free [Dept. 19 Files 02] Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 by Will Hill Page B

cobbled stone of the road.
    “Oh God,” the young man groaned. “Oh God, just kill me.”
    Potts, who had served with remarkable, deadly distinction as the unit’s sniper in some of the darkest corners of the Western Front for the last three and a half years, looked every inch the twenty-year-old boy he really was. Despite the things he had done, the things that they had all done together, he was still little more than a child, a child who was, at that particular moment, extremely drunk.
    “Potts?” said Quincey Harker, his tone stern even as he struggled to hold back the laughter that was bubbling up inside him. “Do you need to go back to the barracks?”
    “No, sir,” replied Potts, shakily. “I’m fine now. Sir.”
    Harker looked at the pale face of his sniper and felt the usual rush of paternal affection. Potts was only four years younger than him, had lived through the same mud-soaked horrors he had, demonstrating bravery and calm that would have been considered remarkable in men twice his age, but four years was enough; he was the baby of the unit, and always would be. Harker, Ellis, McDonald and Kavanagh would all have gladly laid down their lives for him, as they would for each other, if it came to it.
    Thorpe loved him too , thought Harker, and felt pain stab at his heart.
    The five happy, drunken men had once been six.
    Officially, they had been one of the British Army’s Special Reconnaissance Units, highly classified teams of elite soldiers that had operated across the Western Front, doing the work that the Field Marshals at headquarters would never have publicly admitted was being done: assassinations, sabotage, propaganda, bombings. Harker had hand-picked five men to join his unit when it was commissioned in late 1914; the first of them had been Lieutenant Andrew Thorpe, his oldest and closest friend.
    The six of them had worked with astonishing success in the shadowy corners of the Great War: in Poland, Isonzo and Serbia in 1915, in the carnage of Verdun and the sucking, mud-soaked madness of the Somme in 1916, where Harker had disobeyed a direct order that would have put his men at foolhardy risk, for no possible worthwhile gain. Field Marshal Gough, whose order it had been, had waited patiently for his opportunity for revenge and, in 1917, it had presented itself; he had sent the Special Reconnaissance Unit into the village of Passchendaele on a mission they were not expected to return from. And, in one case, the Field Marshal had been correct.
    In the church at the centre of the tiny, shattered village they had found something unnatural, something none of them had seen before. A teenage German soldier had been sitting among the slaughtered remains of his platoon, a skinny, narrow boy whose eyes burned a devilish red when they tried to apprehend him, whose teeth were the fangs of an animal, vast and sharp and gleaming as he sank them into Thorpe’s neck before Harker was able to fire a single shot. Their rifles drove the boy back against a broken window frame, where a piece of wood pierced his emaciated chest, and the tormented, tortured soldier found peace. Thorpe, who had always been the first among them to offer assistance to anyone in need of it, died in Harker’s arms, blood running out of his throat in such quantities that it was over in less than a minute.
    The Special Reconnaissance Unit had returned to headquarters without discussing the thing they had seen in the church; the loss of Thorpe was too heavy in their hearts, and they found it easier not to speak of what had happened. Months later, after Harker had broken the nose of Field Marshal Gough and the squad had been despatched back to the front, after they had seen out the end of the war and been ordered to Rome for some richly deserved and much needed rest, they had still not really talked about it, except in passing.
    Thorpe’s memory loomed large, casting a shadow that never fully lifted. Quincey Harker’s grief was the