The Nachzehrer of Belleau Wood
By Bryan Stubbles
• nach, preposition, German, “after”
• zehren, verb, German, “to feed on,” “to consume”
• Nachzehrer, noun, masc. literally “after-feeder,” “after-consumer”
It’d been a good long fight. The Germans were retreating - for now. Captain Williamson took a drag off his cigarette.
“This Hun stuff ain’t bad.”
He’d taken it from a prisoner earlier that day.
Williamson surveyed his part of Belleau Wood. It was just a bunch of naked gray and black trees. Smoke laid low in the wood. He took a deep breath. He had a total of three men left out of sixty-two. He knew some of them had been captured. Others had been separated from the unit. Right now the order was to stay with his prisoners.
The Americans held three Germans prisoners: Malinowski, Kornwald and Mühlstein. Their gray uniforms were grubby and caked with mud. Only Kornwald still had his field cap. The prisoners sat, dejected and exhausted, on a log. Williamson’s remaining men had formed a rough circle around them. The prisoners had tin cups of black coffee.
“Captain, these Germans aren’t going anywhere,” said Sergeant Drobben. To demonstrate, the sergeant stood up and pointed to the woods.
“Escape?” he asked the prisoners. “Escape?”
The Germans said nothing.
“Stupid, useless Huns,” said the sergeant.
“They’re prisoners and we’ll treat them as prisoners,” said the captain.
The prisoners spoke amongst themselves.
“Gruber, what are they talking about?” asked Williamson.
“Sorry, Captain. I wasn’t paying attention,” admitted Private Gruber.
Private Kurt Gruber was the son of a German father and American mother. He’d grown up in the state of Kansas, in the burg of Wellington. His German was fairly fluent, but he was much more comfortable speaking English. He’d helped Williamson interrogate the prisoners earlier. Kornwald was from a small village in Brandenburg in the Kingdom of Prussia. He farmed, like generations had before. Malinowski was the son of a miner from Ruhr. His Polish surname amused the Americans, but Malinowski spoke only German. The last soldier, Mühlstein, came from Hannover.
Gruber said a few words to the Germans and they eagerly spoke back to him.
“They thanked us for the coffee and are curious about the shotguns.”
The Americans had used Winchester Model 1912 pump shotguns when capturing the Germans’ machine gun nest. The prisoners hadn’t seen shotguns before.
“Hernandez,” said Captain Williamson. “Show these Huns what that Winchester’s made of.” Corporal Hernandez picked up his pump shotgun and emptied six shells at a burnt out tree. Another soldier picked up a rock and threw it at the tree, tipping it over. The shotgun had cut the small, dead tree in half.
Hernandez turned to the Germans and pointed at the Winchester. “Shotgun,” he said.
“Flinte,” said Gruber.
“What’s that?” asked Hernandez.
“They call it a Flinte in German.”
“You boys hungry?” asked Williamson. Gruber asked them the same in German. They answered him.
“Very,” said Gruber.
“Drobben,” said the captain. “Give ‘em your reserve ration.”
“But sir,” said Drobben.
“Don’t give ‘em the tobacco.”
Drobben opened up his field sack and took out a can of corned beef. One whole pound. Sharing it would only give each prisoner a third pound. He thought even that was too much.
“Danke,” each of the prisoners said with a smile.
“They haven’t eaten in three days,” said Gruber.
“I wouldn’t believe anything a Hun says,” said Drobben.
Gruber had heard his comrades insult Germans since he shipped over. He wasn’t a fan of the Kaiser’s imperialism, but he also understood most soldiers didn’t really have a choice. He held his tongue.
The trio ate the corned beef with their hands, scooping out the meat like they were famished.
“How’s the Kaiser gonna win his war if he starves his own men?” asked Drobben.
“He won’t,” said Williamson, flicking his cigarette to the ground.
“Autsch!” yelled Malinowski. The Americans jumped. Hernandez pointed his shotgun straight at Malinowski. The German had cut himself on the can of corned beef. They stared at one another. Malinowski’s bloodshot gray eyes and Hernandez’ bloodshot brown eyes. After several seconds both men erupted in laughter. Violence and slaughter had put everyone on edge.
“At ease,” said Williamson. “You really wanna spook these Germans? Put the bayonet on your shotgun. That’s an order.”
Hernandez fixed the seventeen inch blade on the muzzle.
Dark clouds gathered above the wood, creating a serene gray beauty between the scorched Earth and burnt tree and the sky. A boom came from the sky.
“Artillery,” said Drobben.
“Could be thunder,” said Gruber.
“You wanna ask them?” asked Hernandez.
Gruber asked the Germans. Two of them thought it was artillery. Malinowski swore it was thunder. Hernandez just shrugged.
A telephone bell started ringing. At first the men couldn’t see any field telephone anywhere. There weren’t any poles. The phone kept ringing. Hernandez kept the prisoners under his watch while Sergeant Drobben looked for the phone. He found it on the ground behind a burnt-out log.
“Gruber! Answer it,” ordered the sergeant.
How does one answer a German field telephone? He asked himself. He pointed to Mühlstein.
“Du.”
“Mühlstein hier,” said the German into the phone.
“Hallo? Hallo?” a voice crackled on the other end.
“Ja, hallo,” answered Mühlstein.
“Hallo,” said the voice before fading away. Mühlstein hung up the phone.
“What was all that about?” asked Williamson.
Mühlstein spoke to Gruber in German.
“He thinks it was a bad connection,” said Gruber. Williamson laughed.
“Soon he’ll tell us the sky is blue,” said Williamson.
“It’s gray,” said Gruber. “The sky is gray.”
“Keep our ears open. In case it rings again,” said the captain. An eerie silence fell over the land. The type of silence that makes one notice things that one hadn’t before. “Is that blood on his tunic?” asked Williamson, pointing at Mühlstein.
The others looked at the Soldat. Their prisoners were so grimy and dirty that the Americans had assumed it was mud. What’s the difference between brown on gray versus dark red on gray? The German uniforms were as gray as the sky above.
“Was that from one of our boys?” asked Drobben. Gruber then asked where the blood came from. Mühlstein insisted it was dirt.
The wind picked up, blowing the smoke among the burnt-out trees low to the ground. It resembled fog. The faraway low boom continued.
“We’ve had our food. Fall out and move back,” ordered Williamson. “Hernandez on point. Then Gruber. Then the prisoners. Drobben behind. If the prisoners stop, kill ‘em.”
It was time to deposit their prisoners behind the front lines and hopefully snag some R & R in Paris. The violence of the preceding weeks had ingrained itself in the fiber of every living being around Belleau Wood. The Germans had been stopped. They’d be back.
The men coughed from the smoke.
***
After about an hour’s march, the men came upon a bombed out shell of a building. It resembled a castle turret and was made of stone. It stood two stories tall and bore the scars of war. Much of the plasterwork covering the stones had been blasted away. A tall arched doorway stood sans door. Bare Gothic windows with curved tops occupied the second story. The actual glass was long gone. The group of Americans and their prisoners had reached a hunting lodge, a relic from days when humans preyed upon animals in Belleau Wood.
“Hernandez, Drobben. Check out the top story.” Hernandez had his bayonet-adorned shotgun and Drobben fixed a bayonet on his M1903 Springfield rifle.
They entered the doorless frame.
First floor empty. Someone had taken whatever was inside long ago.
“Clear!” yelled Hernandez.
Broken stone steps curled their way up the wall to the second story. Drobben made a hand signal for Hernandez to go up the stairs. Hernandez rolled his eyes. A guy could get killed checking out hunting lodges on the Western Front. He heard something move while he was still in the stairwell. He pointed to Drobben who then made eye contact with Williamson and motioned up. Williamson grabbed a grenade. He pulled the pin and hucked it through the window.
Hernandez backed down from the stairs. Drobben stayed put. Grenades were strong, but not strong enough to blast through a stone floor. Williamson walked back a bit. The Germans also cautiously moved back. They would have preferred to run, but they also wanted to survive the war. Gruber kept his watch. And…
Nothing.
The men heard the little grenade roll around a bit. Another dud. They heard someone cough.
“Tell him to surrender,” Williamson ordered Gruber.
“Aufgeben!” yelled the private.
This was followed by more coughing from the second floor.
Williamson motioned to Hernandez and Drobben to get back in the stairwell.
“Tell him we’re coming in,” ordered Williamson.
“Wir kommen rein!” yelled Gruber.
“Nicht!” came from the voice inside. Don’t. For someone who was coughing weakly, they possessed some powerful lungs.
“Why not?” asked Williamson.
“Warum nicht?” yelled Gruber. The man in the second story coughed again.
“Bitte,” he said. Please.
“What kinda answer is that?” asked Williamson. “I’ll go up there myself.”
Williamson’s men had noted his enthusiasm for danger before. Gruber figured Williamson was rushing up there as much for medals and a promotion as for any legitimate military purpose. The captain grabbed his Browning 1911 pistol like some knight errant on a quest. A quest against a coughing Hun.
As reckless as possible, Williamson rushed past Hernandez and Drobben and ran into the second story room firing. The two shots he got off echoed among the stones. They hit nothing. Williamson saw a German soldier laying on the floor. He was breathing heavily. He was drenched in blood. This wasn’t mud. A pool of coagulating blood spread on the stone floor. For a man who wasn’t dead, he certainly smelled like death. A Mauser rifle lay next to him.
“Gruber!” yelled Williamson. “Hernandez, go watch the prisoners.” Gruber traded off with Hernandez. “What is this?” asked Williamson.
“Was ist los?” asked Gruber to the man. The man looked like he was losing consciousness. “Wir können dir helfen,” said Gruber. We can help you.
The German soldier shook his head. Blood poured from his mouth and his head slumped to one side. Gruber touched the man’s neck. He was alive, but with an incredibly weak pulse.
“What did this?” asked Williamson.
“Beats me,” said Gruber. He grabbed onto the man’s bloody tunic. A piece of the tunic came off. Under all the blood staining, the man’s clothes had been shredded.
“A shotgun?” asked Drobben from behind them.
“If it shot spikes,” said Gruber.
“If we had a weapon like this, we’d have heard about it by now,” said Williamson.
“Maybe he was wounded in battle. It could be shrapnel from a shell,” said Drobben.
“And he just walked up here and croaked?” asked Williamson.
“It could happen,” Drobben replied.
The men really didn’t have anything to dress the wounded soldier’s wounds.
The men heard barking from outside. They looked out the window. A German Shepherd was harassing the prisoners as if it was chastising them. As if they’d failed their Vaterland. They stepped back and spoke among each other.
“What are they saying?” asked the captain.
“I need to go check,” replied Private Gruber.
“Go.”
He rushed down the broken stairs and to the prisoners. In frustration, he pointed his weapon at the dog. It backed down a bit, though it paced back and forth as if worried about something. The prisoners talked to Gruber.
“They say he’s the dog from their unit,” yelled Gruber.
“Watch him,” said Williamson to Drobben, referring to the three-fourths dead German on the second floor. Williamson also ran down the stairs. “What did they do to him? That’s one angry dog.”
“They don’t know,” replied Gruber. “They just said his name is Willi.”
“You named him after the Kaiser?” asked Williamson with a laugh. The Germans said something and laughed.
“They say he’s a better leader than the Kaiser,” said Gruber.
It wasn’t making a lick of sense. An almost-dead soldier who’d been shredded. An aggravated German Shepherd. The University of Utah’s engineering school hadn’t prepared Williamson for this role. He’d ended up an officer simply because of his diploma. He was regretting that diploma now. He turned to Hernandez, who sometimes had a different view of things.
“Hernandez, what do you make of all this?” he asked the corporal.
Does the captain really want to know what I think? The corporal asked himself. The truth would probably find him being locked up in Leavenworth.
“I’d forget it,” he said.
“Forget it?”
“Sure. Just take these prisoners back and let someone else deal with that soldier in the hunting lodge and the dog,” said the corporal.
Hernandez has a point, thought Williamson. But he was just a corporal.
“Fall back,” said Williamson. No sooner than he’d said that, an artillery shell landed about a hundred yards in front of them. Two more whistles overhead before exploding in the distance. Any hope of moving further behind the lines was dashed like the clods of dirt the shells threw up. Then they saw it.
The yellow.
They smelled it.
The rank horseradish-mustardy smell of inhaled death. True, most people survived mustard gas, but usually did so after being covered in blisters. Even worse were the blisters one couldn’t see: inside the lungs. Those could kill.
Williams didn’t even have to give the order to don gas masks. The Americans took out their M2 gas masks from pouches in their knapsacks. The masks lacked filters. They were made of a rubberized fabric on the outside and a muslin pad on the inside. Khaki colored. They each had two sets of lenses. The outer lenses were made of glass and the inner lenses of cellophane. A strap with a buckle and hook kept it to the head. One couldn’t see worth a damned out of it and it always felt like one was suffocating.
The German prisoners put on their gas masks, contained in metal canisters. This was the Ledersmaske, “leather mask.” This was made of tanned sheepskin because Germany was running out of rubber. The sheepskin had been dipped in an oil sealant. The celluloid lenses were wider than the Americans and had a spider-like metal frame, making them resemble colorless plate glass windows. A cylindrical filter screwed onto the end of the mask. The mask lacked any intake valve, so the air had to be filtered simply by breathing. Mühlstein, Malinowski and Kornwald cursed the Kaiser under their breath. This was a stupid war with stupid poison gasses and stupid deaths. And this American captain didn’t seem to know what he was doing. At least the Americans hadn’t murdered them…yet. The German masks were held to the head by a system of six straps.
The Americans and their prisoners resembled something from a bad dream with their otherworldly gas masks. Williamson had to make a decision. Moving during a gas attack could expose more skin. Mustard gas was technically a mist. It could settle on clothes and still hurt you. Itching would turn to burning and that would turn to the biggest blisters one had ever seen. Williamson’s men were antsy, awaiting any order. Williamson knew mustard gas’ mist usually hung close to the ground unless a mighty wind came along. He looked at the hunting lodge.
“Second story. Now!” he ordered. As he did so,Allied artillery begin to answer the Germans. Christ. What if an errant shell hit the lodge? Williamson led Hernandez, Gruber and the Germans into the lodge and up the stairs.
***
Drobben was finishing putting on his mask when Williamson and the others entered.
“He’s dead, sir,” said Drobben, referring to the bloody German on the stone floor.
“Good riddance,” said Williamson.
Almost simultaneously, Hernandez and Malinowski crossed themselves.
“Cover his face,” ordered the captain. Gruber took the man’s gray field cap and lowered it over his face.
“Sit,” ordered Williamson.
The Germans and Americans sat on the floor. The Americans kept their weapons at the ready. Now was the time to wait. Would the mist find its way into the 2nd story of a hunting lodge?
While saving lives, gas masks made everything else harder. Speaking was reduced to shouts just to be barely heard. The men rested their voices as they waited for the mist to pass. Artillery fire picked up in the distance. The men heard whimpering. Could it be Willi? They looked around at each other. The sound was coming from one of them.
Captain Williamson. He’d seen one too many gas attacks and it finally took its toll. Drobben was prepared to lead the little group if Williamson could not return to his senses. The men sat nearly silently as the yellowish mist passed below. Sergeant Drobben looked out the window. The mustard gas had missed them this time. Williamson stopped his whimpering. A light rain began to fall. Rain was poison gas’ worst enemy. Rain forced the gas onto the ground. The men were safe…for now.
Williamson reclaimed his role as captain when he was the first to remove his mask. Drobben, Gruber and Hernandez followed. Gruber yelled at the prisoners to take their masks off. Then Willi, the German Shepherd, appeared in the doorway. The Americans instinctively grabbed their weapons. The dog barked up a storm, as if it was barking orders to the men.
“Do you speak dog?” asked Williamson to Gruber jokingly.
“Not today,” answered the private. The Germans talked to each other.
“What are they yapping about?” asked Williamson.
“A monster,” said Gruber.
“The only monster we have to deal with is the Kaiser.”
“You should listen to them.”
“What kind of monster is it?” asked the captain.
“I never heard of it,” said Gruber. “They call it a Nachzehrer.”
“What does it do?” asked Williamson.
“It eats people. After a person dies, the person then comes back to life and will eat anything in its way. Except they’re arguing about how to kill one. Malinowski says you need to put a coin in the corpse’s mouth and cut its head off. Mühlstein here is saying to put a brick in its mouth.”
“Why didn’t they tell us earlier?” asked Williamson.
“Would you have believed them?” asked Gruber. “They’re saying they think the Nachzehrer may have gotten this dead German.”
“And who was this Nach- monster before it died?”
“Their old Lieutenant. That’s why they surrendered to us.”
“God help me so that I don’t become a vampire,” said the captain.
“It’s not exactly a vampire.”
“I know that!” yelled the captain. Williamson recognized he was losing control of himself. “How come I haven’t heard of it till now?” asked the captain.
“I dunno. Maybe you didn’t grow up in Northern Germany?”
After all this back-and-forth, the men realized the German Shepherd was gone.
A field telephone phone rang.
“There’s a phone out there?” asked Hernandez.
“Someone needs to answer it,” said Williamson.
He would order that. Answer a phone in the rain just after a gas attack.
“Du,” said the captain, pointing at Kornwald. “Hernandez, take him down there, find the phone and make him talk to whoever is calling.” Hernandez took the repeating shotgun and bayonet and followed Kornwald down the stairs.
The duo walked across the wet grass. Sure enough there was a telephone half-buried in the dirt. Hernandez couldn’t see any wires leading anywhere.
Kornwald answered the phone like an obedient prisoner.
“Kornwald hier,” he said.
Screams echoed from the phone louder than the bursting artillery shells in the distance. Even the soldiers inside the hunting lodge could hear them.
“Is that Kornwald or the phone?” asked Gruber. The men inside watched the scene unfold.
Kornwald dropped the phone and took off running west.
“He’s getting away! Shoot him!” ordered Williamson from the broken window. He said that line with so much gusto that it sounded like he’d waited his whole life and this whole useless war to say it.
Hernandez raised the shotgun to his shoulder as if he would indeed pump poor Kornwald full of buckshot.
I really don’t want to kill anyone, he said to himself.
“Turn around!” yelled the men in the hunting lodge.
When Hernandez turned, he saw a tall man with gray skin. The skin’s color matched the tattered German uniform the man wore. Hernandez realized nearly half of the uniform had been ripped away. The man wore a pickelhaube with a cloth covering. Hernandez then saw it was actually the newer German Stahlheim helmet with a covering for the old pickelhaube. By this time in the war, many Germans wore a mix and match of various ersatz clothes. A blackish ribbon hung loosely between two buttonholes. The man’s ears seemed to be elongated and his mouth and lips were absolutely blood red. His eyes were pure white.
Hernandez fired two loads of buckshot into this ungodly being. They had no effect except to shred what was left of his clothes even more. Hernandez knew not to waste any more ammunition on the uncanny creature. He retreated to the other side of the hunting lodge.
“Gruber! Drobben! Get out there!” ordered the captain.
The two men just stood there. They weren’t about to get themselves killed by a revenant.
A French poilu ran into view from the east straight from the woods. He wore the typical “horizon blue” uniform, called that because it supposedly captured the color which separates the sky from the earth. To the Americans it was simply “blue gray.” He still had his crested steel helmet and carried an 1886 Lebel 8 millimeter rifle, sans bayonet. Whatever he was running from would be a walk in the park compared to what he was running into. The German monster clipped him. The poilu hit the ground hard, landing on his back and knocking his helmet off.
“Non. Non!” he yelled.
He fired his rifle, blowing a small chunk out of the monster’s back. It did not stop the monster, who simply grabbed the Frenchman’s rifle. The monster then drove the barrel through the soldier’s trunk and into the ground, pinning him to the ground like a skewer. The soldier screamed like a stuck pig. Blood bubbled up through the wound.
“Jesus Christ,” said Williamson from the safety of the lodge.
“That’s the Nachzehrer,” said Gruber, stating the obvious.
The Americans opened up a blistering fire, Drobben fired his rifle and Gruber used his shotgun. Williamson shot his pistol.
They were landing hits. It’s just that the Nachzehrer didn’t care. In fact, as if to egg the Americans on, he took a bite out of the Frenchman’s throat. Blood sprayed from the wound, covering the half naked Nachzehrer. The red stuff contrasted with his gray skin. The fresh blood also gave his lips and mouth a deeper red hue, making them stand out even more. He ripped a chunk out of the dead soldier’s chest with his bare hand. The chunk included a piece of that blue gray uniform. Then, staring at the Americans, he ate the fleshy mass as if to dare them to stop him.
One of the American bullets went through his head. He simply shook his head as if he had vertigo for a couple seconds. Brains oozed out his temple. It’s mighty hard to kill something that’s already dead. He smiled at the trio of Yankees on the second floor of the hunting lodge. He took a moment to scrape some brain matter on his finger and eat it. He then screamed, as if eating his own flesh triggered something deep within him. The Nachzehrer pulled the rifle out of the dead Frenchman and fired at the Americans, shooting from the hip. The monster sent a bullet into Drobben’s shoulder, knocking him to the stone floor. Great shooting for a dead guy.
“I can’t feel my arm!” squealed Drobben. His bloody and limp arm hung uselessly from his shoulder like a wet rope. Drobben picked up the shotgun and fired it one-handed. The gun’s kick blew the shotgun back and straight into the sergeant’s face. Blood flowed from his nose like a spigot.
“Gruber, stay with me,” ordered the captain. Gruber turned around to check on the prisoners. They’d vamoosed. Who could blame them?
“Hernandez!” yelled Gruber. He looked down to where he last saw Hernandez taking cover behind the lodge. Well, the corporal was also gone. Fair enough. Was Gruber gonna die a hero against a monstrous undead German or would he live to see Kansas again? The monster fired another shot and missed.
Private Gruber was contemplating his own getaway when yet another artillery shell landed right there in the forest, cratering the forest floor. The smoke from the blast mixed with another color: that yellow bastard mustard gas. Again. The horseradish-smelling mist rose high in the air this time. That Nachzehrer wouldn’t give a damn about poison gas. Before he could even think, Gruber grabbed his gas mask.
“Help!” yelled Drobben. He was in bad shape. Shrapnel from the shell had embedded itself in his sternum. Everything he wore was red with blood now. Gruber couldn’t leave his sergeant to a gas attack. He grabbed Drobben’s gas mask and affixed it to the sergeant’s head.
POP! Another bullet from the Nachzehrer sailed into the lodge.
“Save yourself!” Drobben yelled at Gruber. He was close to death with his bullet and shrapnel wounds. “Let me shoot him,” Drobben said to Gruber.
The private dragged Drobben to the window. He grabbed the shotgun and gave it to Drobben. He grabbed the dead German’s Mauser rifle and gave it to Drobben. He kept the Springfield rifle for himself.
Meanwhile, Captain Williamson was wearing a gas mask and holding his pistol.
“Advance!” he yelled. And just like that, he ran down the stairs and into the morass of dirt, wood, smoke, rain and mustard gas that lay outside. And a Nachzehrer. Williamson would die however officers die, full of honor or something. Gruber knew this would be his chance to escape death’s hellish quagmire. He ran outside with the rifle. Everything outside was hazy. He felt an itching on his hands. He’d forgotten to cover his hands! Later they would have blisters the size of marbles or golf balls.
He heard Williamson shooting at the monster. The haze cleared enough for Gruber to see the horror through his gas mask lenses.
Captain Williamson pointed the .45 pistol point blank at the Nachzehrer. The monster tore the good captain’s hand clean off and ate it. Williamson screamed almost as loud as the Frenchman. This was music to the monster’s elongated ears. The Nachzehrer clawed at the captain. Several shots from Drobben hit the monster. Williamson used his good hand to punch the monster. Its flesh was rotting and liquifying. In desperation, Williamson grabbed at anything. He tore at the monster’s shoddy rags. He grabbed the ribbon between the buttons. It was an Iron Cross ribbon. This only angered the Nachzehrer. The monster bit through the gas mask to take off Williamson’s left ear. In a second, the monster had swallowed it, flesh, fabric and all. This time the captain didn’t scream.
Private Gruber backed away from the scene, unable to look away but not wanting to stick around.
The monster grabbed Williamson’s leg and stripped it like a chicken drumstick, leaving only bone and tattered rags. Williamson grabbed the .45 off the ground and fired. The bullet went straight into the monster’s groin and apparently didn’t exit. The annoyed Nachzehrer reached into Williamson’s chest and pulled out his heart, turned toward Drobben in the lodge, and ate the fresh heart whole. The Nachzehrer was ravenous and the captain was but a drop in the bucket of death for this flesh-hungry fiend.
The monster stayed focused on Drobben and started walking towards the hunting lodge.
Gruber ran as far as he could. He made his way through the burnt out trees and craters. Artillery fire boomed in the distance. After running about three hundred yards, he had to catch his breath (if such a thing was possible in a gas mask). Gunfire behind him. Drobben was still shooting at the Nachzehrer. The shots became fewer and fewer. Gruber stopped. He aimed his rifle as best he could, considering the cellophane and glass lenses he had to look through. He waited for an opening in the haze. The sergeant had saved Gruber’s life by distracting the monster. Gruber decided then and there that his sergeant wouldn’t be a victim to this hellish fiend. The wind picked up and the little hunting lodge came into view. The monster would be inside by now. Gruber saw a body hanging halfway out the window. Drobben would do that rather than get eaten by the Nachzehrer, Gruber thought as he squeezed the trigger.
“...the Nachzehrer is as much dreaded in many parts of Germany as the Vrykolaka is in Russia. In some parts of the Kaiser's dominions, food is still buried with the corpse in order to assuage any pangs of hunger that may arise; and even when this is not done, a few grains
of corn or rice are scattered upon the grave as a survival of the ancient custom.”
• Vampires and Vampirism, by Dudley Wright, 1914
****
The son of a USMC veteran, Bryan has published numerous short stories. He translates Korean and Indonesian into English. His debut horror novel MADDILYN is available on Amazon and Godless. Bryan is also a trained and experienced genealogist and is looking for clients. He recently reunited two Filipino families with their American relatives after nearly 80 years. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter/X @BStubbles,Tiktok @BryanStubbles and Instagram @bryanstubbles