The Night Children by Alexander Gordon Smith

2103
    He had always thought that hell would be hot. But here they were, right inside the mouth of it, and it was freezing.
    Splintered trees littered the icy ground like loose teeth, branches embedded in blackened, gum-like craters. Overhead roiled a sky of smoke, as thick as rock, as if the whole world were being engulfed by a cavernous maw. The air carried the stench of death, of misted blood, of terror, a breath that seemed to rise right from the gullet of the underworld. And there was deafening laughter, too, a series of barked explosions that rocked the forest like some demonic chuckle.
    Corporal Donnie Brixton crouched in his foxhole, too numb to feel the cold anymore. Pressed up against him on one side was Eddie Argento, and on the other Michael Levy, the same tremor passing through all three men. They faced south, where fire blistered the trees a half-mile away. Another explosion detonated in the middle of the inferno, turning night into day, the shock wave forcing drifts of snow to rise up and dance around them.
    Donnie couldn’t remember the last time anybody had spoken, or moved. They could have been fixed here for years, for a lifetime, statues discarded in the forest. The only reminder of life was the clouds of breath squeezed from blue lips, which floated momentarily toward the distant chaos before rising abruptly, escaping. Donnie watched them go and felt that with each exhalation he was watching a little piece of his soul drift away.
    But that was okay, because surely here it was better not to have a soul.
    More explosions, three, four, the light so bright that Donnie had to squint. Something more than mortars. More than artillery. Tigers, maybe. Whatever it was, nothing could be left alive back there. Which meant the platoon was gone, which meant there was nothing between this foxhole and Bastogne but Germans.
    Footsteps, fast and hard, and then a shape skidded into the ditch, a welcome warmth against Donnie’s back.
    “Nothing,” hissed Henry Grady, his teeth chattering. “Can’t reach Hayling, can’t reach division neither.”
    Donnie swore, cold locking the word inside his mouth. He turned away from the inferno, sliding down the side of the foxhole and pulling his coat tight against his neck. The others hunkered down around him, their eyes wet with fear, their skin as white and as delicate as bone china. Four boys, and even if they pooled their years they’d be well short of a century. He was the oldest, at twenty-three. Eddie was the youngest, eighteen but looking half that as he pushed his helmet up from his nose and sneezed quietly into his sleeve.
    “What now?” said Mike, patting his pockets for a cigarette he didn’t have.
    “We’re cut off,” said Eddie, sniffing. “Right?”
    Donnie nodded. They’d left the front maybe thirty minutes ago. If they’d stayed for one more cup of joe then they’d never have left at all. Nobody had seen it coming. Not tanks, not here. The Germans were supposed to be exhausted, underequipped. For days now the platoon had been camped in the snow and the wind, and the most action they’d seen was a couple of firefights and a mortar attack that had fallen well wide of their foxholes.
    But now? Donnie screwed his eyes shut, trying not to think about his friends back on the line, the men who had been pummeled into the earth by a fist of fire and fury. Acid boiled up his throat and it was all he could do not to cry out. They weren’t your friends, he had to scream at himself. You don’t have friends out here, you can’t have them, it costs too much.
    “Donnie?” Eddie said. “What do we do?”
    “We carry on,” he said eventually. Thunder ripped through the trees, a blast that made the ground tremble. There was a crack and a shuddering groan as one of the ancient trees splintered and fell. “We’ve got a mission.”
    “What good’s finding Cuddy and his men gonna be now?” said Mike. “We should get back to the line, gonna need everyone they can get.”
    “You think the four of us