Not long after the Allied infantry secured the bridge, Faucheux and his team were stacked up outside the doorway of a house on the corner. He was about to move in and clear it out himself with the flame thrower he was now carrying, but Dumont rested a hand on his shoulder. Faucheux looked over and saw him pass his sniper rifle off to an ally, reach back, and pull something down over his shoulder.
Simplicity, Faucheux remembered Dumont explaining on the truck ride over.
It was a hand painted, three-and-a-half foot long, solid steel trench bat with pointed knobs welded all around the end. Thing looked deadly to say the least, and no one who'd faced the business end had lived to tell about it, so the reputation was there to back it up. Although Dumont was the team's marksman, he had no qualms about getting up close and personal. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There was something he greatly appreciated about the long lasting effectiveness of the club that has survived the test of time all throughout known history. No matter how sophisticated weapons became or how skilled the wielder, if you bonked him or her on the head hard enough, they were going down for good. Blunt trauma was blunt trauma. End of discussion.
Dumont went inside while the others stealthily continued on to raid and sabotage the enemy's weapon supply. Now alone, he was cautious to the point of paranoia, which was a healthy mind state given the situation. Yes, one smack and any given bad guy probably wouldn't get up again. That still didn't change the fact that they had guns while he had a stick. He decided it couldn't hurt him to exercise a bit of stealth as well. He hugged the wall and crept down the hall at a slow tip-toe.
The house seemed enormous from the outside, and in his honest opinion was a beautiful feat of architecture that was being horribly desecrated by the bombs dropping from the planes overhead. War is war though, and as a result it turned out to be quite cramped on the inside. He found himself in some clustered foyer littered with all types of debris.
It was difficult not to make any noise when practically everything was crunching underfoot. He used some of this rubbish to his advantage though, namely a dilapidated wooden dresser leaning against the wall on the left side. A funny feeling he chalked up to alert instincts made him believe that hiding behind this dresser would be a good idea. This proved correct of course, as soon after he did, he detected a crunching sound coming from the far end of the foyer, growing louder as it drew closer.
Finally, a helpful shadow casted itself on Dumont's position as an unknown figure walked past an open threshold where the sunshine came pouring in. Seconds later, an officious looking Axis soldier wearing an eye patch beneath a black utility cover cap strode past him waving a pistol about. He happened to glance over just as Dumont was coming down with the trench bat.
Dumont brought it down full force onto the man's skull with a sickening thok! He felt the bone cave in under the impact of the single deadly blow and knew at once he'd done some permanent damage. If his foe was still alive, he was a drooling vegetable at best. Dumont stepped over the downed Axis soldier and continued cautiously to the end of the foyer.
When he got to the destroyed section of the house where the soldier had come in through, he knelt and armed a 'bouncing betty' proximity mine. An image of the late Private Perilloux inadvertently came to mind as he did so and he immediately wiped it from his mind. Just that brief exposure however, made him feel less like a monster about what he'd just done.
This was about getting even, about settling the score for Perilloux, or so he kept telling himself. He didn't want to admit to himself what he thought deep down was the truth. The same thing that caused him so much strife and inner turmoil, a hypocritical imbalance that the negative voice in his head fed on and used as fuel to torment him whenever he was by himself.
The cursed truth was that he was a combat medic sworn to save lives and protect the wounded, yet at his core, in some eternal fiber of his being, there was this insatiable bloodlust that could only be temporarily assuaged by the refreshing experience of bashing someones' brains in with a foreign object. The horrible truth was, Dumont loved war.
Faucheux radioed him as he exited the house the way he'd come in and caught him up to speed on the team's progress.
"We've located where they were storing their ammunition and rigged it with timed explosives. Won't be much of a battle once they run out of bullets. I've already informed Peterson, and armored and infantry forces are on the way. Time to fall back and let them do their jobs."
"Compris," Dumont replied.