Blood Trail

level. With one last apprehensive look into the shadows, he continued his journey to the village.
    It wasn't difficult to find.

    Harsh white light from a half dozen truck-mounted searchlights illuminated the village square.
    A small group of villagers stood huddled on one side, guarded by a squad of SS. A man who appeared to be the local commander strode up and down between the two, slapping a swagger stick against his leg in the best Nazi approved manner. Except for the slap of the stick against the leather boot top, the scene was surreally silent.

    Henry moved closer. He let the sentry live. Until he knew what was going on, another unexplained death could potentially do more harm than good. At the edge of the square he slid into a recessed doorway, waiting in its cover for what would happen next.

    The tiny village held probably no more than two hundred people at the very best of times, which these certainly weren't. Its position, near both the border and the rail lines the invaders needed to continue their push north, made it a focal point for the Dutch Resistance. The Resistance had brought Henry, but unfortunately it had also brought the SS.

    There were seventy-one villagers in the square, mostly the old, the young, and the infirm.
    Pulled from their beds, they wore a wide variety of nightclothes and almost identical wary expressions. As Henry watched, two heavily armed men brought in five more.

    "These are the last?" the officer asked. On receiving an affirmative, he marched forward.

    "We know where the missing members of your families are," he said curtly, his Dutch accented but perfectly understandable. "The train they were to have stopped is not coming. It was a trap to draw them out." He paused for a reaction but received only the same wary stares.
    Although those of an age to understand were very afraid, they hid it well; Henry's sensitive nose picked up the scent, but the commander had no way of knowing his news had had any effect. The apparent lack of response added an edge to his next words.

    "By now they are dead. All of them." A young boy smothered a cry and the commander almost smiled. "But it is not enough," he continued in softer tones, "to merely wipe out resistance. We must wipe out any further thought of resistance. You will all be executed and every building in this place will be burned to the ground as both an example of what happens to those civilians who dare support the Resistance and to those inferiors who dare oppose the Master Race."

    "Germans," snorted an old woman, clutching at her faded bathrobe with arthritic fingers.
    "Talk you to death before they shoot you."

    Henry was inclined to agree - the commander definitely sounded like he'd been watching too many propaganda films. This did not lessen the danger. Regardless of what else Hitler had done in his "economic reforms," he'd at least managed to find jobs for every sadistic son-of-a-bitch in the country.

    "You." The swagger stick indicated the old woman. "Come here."

    Shaking off the restraining hands of friends and relatives and muttering under her breath, she stomped out of the crowd. The top of her head, with its sparse gray hair twisted tightly into an unforgiving bun, came barely up to the commander's collarbone.

    "You," he told her, "have volunteered to be first." With rheumy eyes squinted almost shut in the glare of the searchlights, she raised her head and said something so rude, not to mention biologically impossible, that it drew a shocked, "Mother!" from an elderly man in the clutter of villagers. Just to be sure the commander got the idea, she repeated herself in German. The swagger stick rose to strike. Henry moved, recognizing as he did so that it was a stupid, impulsive thing to do but unable to stop himself.

    He caught the commander's wrist at the apex of the swing, continued the movement and, exerting his full strength, ripped the arm from the socket. Dropping the body, he turned to charge the rest of the squad, swinging his grisly, bleeding trophy like a club, lips drawn back from his teeth so that the elongated canines gleamed.

    The entire attack had taken just under seven seconds.

    The Nazis were not the first to use terror as a weapon; Henry's kind had learned its value centuries before. It gave him time to reach the first of the guards before any of them remembered they held weapons.

    By the time they gathered their wits enough to shoot, he had another body to use as a shield.
    He heard shouting