Free The Devil's Blessing by Tony Hernandez

comfortably, with an arm to one side, leg gently bent under the other, as if he was asleep. He would be the spitting image of a person at rest if it wasn’t for the gore that had replaced his head. One could not call it a face, because there was nothing there. Just bits of meat, teeth, eyes without eyelids. There was probably bits and pieces of the men all around him, and it gave him a shiver, like being in a dark room full of roaches.
    “Begin to place them in. We’ll get the one that nearly got away,” Ingersleben said.
    “Place them in?”
    “Yes, you idiot,” Wernher said, as he kicked and shoved a body that was laying outside the hole back down into it. “Place them in. How else are we to bury them?”
    Otto knew that, if it had been up to Wernher, he would have been in that hole, as dead as the men in front of them. So why would Ingersleben want him alive? He wanted to know so that he could continue living, of course, but a larger part of him was just dying from the curiosity.
    As Ingersleben and Wernher went to go retrieve the man from the field, Lafenz stayed behind without being told. It seemed as if the young man did not want to have any part in what had happened in the field. More likely, he was there to make sure that Otto didn’t run. Whatever the case, Otto was both happy and a little afraid to have the young killer with him.
    But having him did prove to be an asset right from the start. Otto, notorious for being unable to take the lead on anything or knowing where to start, followed Lafenz as he grabbed the men, or what was left of them, and began pushing the bodies into the hole.
    It seemed as if they were pieces of luggage to Lafenz. He would just grab the nearest part, usually an elbow or a wrist, and pull the body that way. He even grabbed the dead by their skin, something that Otto wasn’t willing to do. He would grab the bodies only above their clothes. He wasn’t sure why, but he would not touch the skin of the dead, no matter what someone told him.
    It was a sad sight to see as Ingersleben and Wernher make their return.
    They were carrying a dead comrade, something he had seen several times before. Ingersleben had him from under the armpits, while Wernher had him by the ankles. It was as if they were carrying someone they loved and cared for, but Otto knew it not to be so. They had killed the man in cold blood and were now going to bury him in a grave, never to be seen again, like some sort of sick dog on a farm.
    They casually tossed the man onto the top of the heap of bodies. It looked as if he had been shot once in the head, and there were bullet holes in the back of his jacket.
    After catching his breath, Wernher looked at Otto.
    “Well, don’t just stand there,” he said. “Let's bury what happened.”
    Truer words had never been said. They weren’t burying people, per se, so much as they were burying a crime, a crime that Otto was now a part of. But better to be on the side of the crime where one breathes than to be on the side of those who don’t.
    Ingersleben was using a small shovel, while the others used their hands to shove the long mound of dirt back onto the corpses. Otto was having a bit of a harder time than the rest of them, and Wernher noted why.
    “Put the gun down!” he said. Otto had kept hold of the gun as he moved the dirt. He hadn't realized he was even doing it.
    “Don’t worry,” Ingersleben said. “If we wanted to kill you, we would have killed you.”
    For some reason that made Otto feel equal parts relieved and terrified.

Chapter Twelve

    The burial was more exhausting than originally thought, and they decided to take the rest of the day off. They all agreed to the plan to go west and to turn themselves over to Allied Powers as soon as they came across them, but for now, for them, in the east, that might as well have been on the other side of the planet.
    When they awoke the next morning, the ground was covered in an even deeper snow. It had stopped