Picking the Bones by Brian Hodge

Author:Brian Hodge [Brian Hodge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Dark Fiction, Dark Fantasy, Thriller, Supernatural, Short Stories, Collections & Anthologies
ISBN: 9781587673481
Google: TvopKQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 10361163
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2011-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

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Before sending Horst on his way, camera in hand, the sergeant assigned one of the young soldiers to accompany and assist him—not the boy who’d surrendered the Leica, but another one just as skinny, wearing a topcoat made for a man with longer arms. The flanges of his helmet nearly touched his shoulders, and if a razor had scraped his chin yet, Horst would’ve been surprised. He was blue-eyed and pale, with plump cheeks that flushed in the cold like summer’s first blush of red on an apple.

They didn’t speak for a while—why ask his name when he would probably be dead by spring?—until the alien loneliness of the place, and the constant presence of the dead, got to be too much. The boy identified himself as Schütze Kaltenbach, which should’ve been enough, but all along Horst had never really thought like a soldier. Rank meant little, just a formality of hierarchy, and as a private, the youth was at the bottom of the ladder.

So what was his name?

“Bruno,” he said.

Looking lost and far from home, he watched Horst take pictures, a succession of ghastly moments frozen by flames. Here, someone burnt down to little more than a skeleton, lower legs straddling the framework of a fallen bicycle. There, a family huddled against a wall that had started to crumble away behind them, their faces seared into tight, dark masks that pulled away from their ivory teeth. Across the room, another of them lay stretched out on the floor, jaws stretched wide in a final yawn as though she’d died while gasping for air that had been sucked away to feed the fire.

“I wish I’d been here,” Bruno finally told him, and slapped his hand against the worn wooden stock of his weapon, as if he needed to feel the sting of it. “I would’ve shot down some of their planes.”

“You’d do this with your rifle?”

“I’m an excellent marksman. I would’ve climbed to the top of a bell tower and aimed for the pilots.”

Horst glanced at him over one shoulder. “How long have you had that rifle?”

“About…six weeks.”

“Then I’d expect you to bring down a whole squadron,” he said, and tried to sound as though he meant it.

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