She sighed and continued, “I was the only one who saw what she had become. The hunger, rather than love or grief in her eyes when we returned home. I was the one who shot her between the eyes before they could even recover from the bloody sight we found. My brother has forgiven me, but even now I’m not sure father has.” She looked at Boris with a grim face. “I knew something was wrong when I saw her licking blood from little Jakob’s body.”
A sob broke her composure before she pushed on, “She was not my mother anymore. She was a monster. Stories were already being told in the markets and villages we visited about such and about how to deal with them.”
Olaf looked at her, startled. He wanted to wrap her protectively in his arms as he heard her tale. But, everything in her body language told him doing so was not a good idea. Her arms were outstretched as if pushing everything in the world away from her.
Softly, but intensely, he said, “You did the right thing. There was nothing you could have done to save your mother at that point. She was a monster. She was not who she once had been. She was an unsuccessful attempt by some Vampire to create another. When the turning fails, the victim becomes a hungry, vicious, eating machine. Many called them Nosferatu before the Fall. They lose any sense of what they had been.”
Stasia looked confused, so Olaf continued. “Vampires are those that successfully change. They retain their intelligence and most of their memories. Often, the infection does change their personality, though. Nosferatu are walking appetites. Cunning, but not intelligent, and not even a shadow of their former selves remains. What you killed may have had the shell, the form, of your mother. However, your mother was already long gone.”
Stasia stood there a moment, processing what he had just explained to her. Then a pair of tears started traveling down her face. Olaf could not hold back any longer. In the darkness the world had become, people needed to comfort each other.
He reached forward and pulled her into a firm hug. At first, she stiffened at the intrusion into her space. Then, as his warmth and his understanding of the tragedy that had befallen her family enveloped her, she started quietly sobbing. He held her until the grief she had kept so long locked away flowed out in a torrent.
She had been afraid her mother had somehow chosen to become a monster. She had never grieved because of that, thinking the worst. However, knowing that the beast had instead stolen her mother's form and there was nothing truly left of her beauty and kindness by that point allowed Stasia to finally grieve for her.
<<<>>>
Once the grief had run its course, she had fallen into an exhausted doze. Olaf let her sleep, thinking about what she had said—she was not likely trusted by her father and perhaps some of the other resistance leaders. She was a leader herself. That meant enough to him. He trusted her. He hoped at least. Perhaps trust was not the right term. Respected might be better.
It would have to be enough to work on. She did not know where the Vampire based herself, but a half-dozen of the leaders she knew did. Olaf needed that information. He may well need the forces they commanded as well.
He needed to go to one of the leaders' meetings. He waited until after the evening meal before he brought it up again. They had to be getting close to the point where Major Petronova was nearing the borders of the Vampire’s territory. They could lose the opportunity to act and cut the head from the snake if they did not move soon.
She could take this weapon and run if her force was defeated. That was the last thing anyone, local or from New Romanovka, needed.
He had to admit the fact that she had shot the Nosferatu both impressed and concerned him. It impressed him because it showed, even at a young age, she had the necessary internal fortitude to do what was needed. It concerned him because it also showed that she may still react rather than thinking something through. To survive, he slowly admitted, it could be a necessary trait.
He put it to the side. It was a trait she seemed to have that he could account for. Finally, he reached a decision. Taking Stasia to the side, he said, “We need to move. Either your people will be with us or they won't. We have to hit their base when it’s vulnerable. I cannot see a sensible strategist inviting an attack from Petronova's battalion. It would be suicide to expose it to such an attack unless they are far weaker than you have described.”
“What do you mean?” Stasia asked, sounding confused. “A battalion is what, five hundred men? They only have three hundred or so.”
Olaf rolled his eyes and looked at her, “They only have three hundred that you have encountered. I’m not criticizing you, but with ninety guerrillas on active operations, how many do you have recovering or doing other tasks?”
Stasia paused and stopped to think. Slowly she answered, “Maybe a hundred and fifty. Hunting, farming in a few hidden sites, scavenging. Maybe a few more.”
Olaf nodded and then said, “And from what you’ve told me, you only hit them from the west. We have no idea how far east she operates. I have to assume she has at least another three hundred on that side of her lands. That leaves her with as many as another three hundred she can probably field in an emergency. So, let's say that there are two hundred too far out for her to consolidate. That leaves seven hundred she could send out. I guess if she goes personally, she'll leave fifty or so at the base.
“If she stays, I would estimate anywhere up to a hundred and fifty, including any Nosferatu she has maintained control of. If Raina is a typical Vampire, she will stay in the rear, but we can’t count on that. In a careful assault, I would expect my force to be the equal of any sixty or seventy of the enemy. Your guerrilla forces should be at least equal to her soldiers. So, I need at least a hundred and fifty guerrillas to reinforce us if we assault her base. Otherwise, we will take too many casualties,” he offered.
Stasia was thoughtfully looking at Olaf, then she shrugged and said, “There are more than ninety of us active at one time. Finding that many willing to join in an attack on the base may be pushing it. Then again, if we have long enough to gather them we can probably find as many as two hundred and fifty.”
“And if we use distraction tactics to disperse them around the area surrounding the base, we can defeat them in detail, increasing our effective numbers and reducing theirs,” Olaf finished.
Stasia sighed and nodded, “Very well. Get everyone ready to move in the morning. The next leadership meeting is in three days, and it’s two days travel to the north-east.”
Olaf nodded and started circulating among his troops. They would be ready to move at dawn.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The meeting place was, Olaf had to admit, a magnificently beautiful place. The smell of damp earth mixed with the spring’s smells of budding trees and the sharp odor of fresh water from the stream next to it.
It still made Olaf an unhappy man. It was too closed in. If an enemy force got close enough, they could easily surround it and trap whoever was in the dell.
He was glad to see that they were not the first to arrive and had been happy to send a couple of Weres out to hunt for deer to cook for the meeting. He also set teams of five to watch the most vulnerable approaches. He was still incredibly nervous about it all. His watchers were having to trust individuals from the two groups they had met at the site for identifying friendlies.
There had been worse setups in history. Indeed, partisans in World War II had often been forced to rely on radio given time/date coordination methods with groups outside their cells. At least many of the guerrillas in the region knew some of the members of several other teams.
Not all the individual guerrillas would be coming, he had since learned. Many were sending just their leaders and a small bodyguard. Others were sending single voting representatives. Oskar, the leader of the small band that had arrived first, had glared at Stasia when Olaf had first told him about his minimum requirements.
“We can easily find four hundred fighters that will be interested in your proposal. That is not an issue. The issue is convin
cing us you can take out the tank the bitch has up and running,” Oskar had told him. “Stasia was only talking about the unit her family leads. There are a dozen, maybe more, of a similar size in the region. Many of the representatives bring homing pigeons to these meetings. Getting a secure message for a meeting point to organize an assault on the base is not the issue. Assaulting their base past a damned tank that can incinerate any that get within a kilometer, that is the issue.”
Olaf only shrugged and answered. “I have such a weapon. I can even give a demonstration of it if necessary, but that can wait for the meeting.” He liked Oskar. An ‘older’ man of about fifty, he was five-foot-six and had a teak hardness about him. It was as if rather than being worn down by age and hardship, it had merely toughened him.
“So, you think an assault on the base is possible with my platoon leading the way?” he asked the guerrilla leader.
He had already shown those currently at the site his other form when Stasia had explained how five of his had disrupted and would have been able to take out her patrol of twenty-five. That they had managed to gain the upper hand after being ambushed.
“Not only possible, but if you can take out the tank, it’s necessary. This long struggle needs to end for the people to recover. I’m ashamed to admit my family was part of the groups that pushed your kind—the Weres—out after the disasters. We blamed them. Perhaps if we had embraced them, we would not be in the situation now.” There was a sad tinge of half-wonder in Oskar’s voice as he spoke.
Olaf smiled, and gently patted the man on the shoulder. “Perhaps not, as well. It’s possible that if this Raina had defeated the leaders of the packs, she would have subjugated them as well. She is a third or fourth generation Vampire at my best guess. If she is the third generation, few Weres would have risked fighting her. My father would have, as would my godfather or siblings, but we are of a different line to most.” He looked off into the distance.
He had heard about the pogroms that had enveloped Eastern Europe after the Fall. Weres had suffered, though not as severely as the Vampires. His father estimated that in the first five years after the Fall, anywhere up to ninety percent of the active Vampires had been killed. But all the Weres had been pushed either east or west from those nations. Few had been killed, but in Romania, Latvia, Belarus, Serbia, and a few other nations, they had been forced out.
Boris wasn’t furious about what had happened. He had seen it all before. The people had been afraid and had needed to take that fear out on one group or another. In some ways, it was better for the Weres and Vampires to be a target. Vampires are restricted in their travel habits. Weres are not. Once the fear had become evident to them, many had fled to the wilds and kept hidden. Others had lived in their animal forms. Whereas Vampires were dragged by mobs into the sun, killing them.
Not only that, it had driven many Weres to Boris’s realm, bolstering the numbers there. The extra help with hunting had made it possible for him to rescue and provide for more refugees.
Still, given the general antipathy between Weres and Vampires after the Fall, it would have been just as likely that they would have been a boost to the guerrilla movement.
In the meantime, Olaf kept considering other plans. Other options with the potential forces that would be available to him. It was obvious that Oskar was tired of the conflict. It seemed likely that others would be, too. So long as it wasn’t a suicide operation or one that was too high a risk, Olaf was more than willing to help them with it.
<<<>>>
The meeting was tense. Planning between groups often was. When Stasia had introduced Olaf, it got worse. At least half the partisan leaders were highly suspicious of any outside influence. Others were positioning themselves, either around Stasia or around the leader most hostile to the plan. That leader was her father, Andrev.
Olaf could see he was growing less and less reasonable. There was a glint of insanity in his eyes. Slowly, Olaf came to realize both the wisdom and the folly of being convinced not to wear a weapon or sidearm to this meeting. The wisdom was they probably would have attacked him by now if he had. The folly was they were going to attack him anyway.
When her father started a diatribe, Olaf could sense an imminent danger. “Here they come to ‘rescue' us, to ‘help' us after abandoning us for fifty years,” the madman thundered. “We have a chance here to show them we do not need or want such help at so late a date. Screw them. We can find a way on our own.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd around and behind him as he paused. Despite the display of cooperation, others who held less strict views started edging away from the vehemence he was displaying. Physically distancing themselves from where the insanity was being presented.
“We need to send the message that we are independent of all would-be tyrants.” Andrev's eyes narrowed like a coiled snake just before it struck, and Olaf hesitated for a moment. It was a moment too long. As fast as a serpent, Andrev drew his pistol and fired three shots at him. Before the echo from the final crack had finished, there was the hiss of a knife being pulled from a sheath and Andrev's eye sprouted a hilt. There was a brief expression of shock on his face.
In almost the same fragment of time, Andrev and Olaf collapsed to the ground. The only difference between them was that Olaf was still breathing.
“Gods be damned, that hurts,” he gasped as he felt the pummeling his chest had taken and a burn from the side of his face where a bullet had grazed it.
Then his attention was drawn to a gurgling sound behind him. Twisting to his feet and turning towards the sound he groaned in pain. He spotted where it was coming from. Oskar had been hit by the bullet that had grazed Olaf’s face. He had been standing on a rock towards the back of the crowd, watching.
Olaf recognized the sound. It was the familiar sound of a punctured lung as it struggled to inflate with every breath. Stumbling through the crowd, he scrabbled at the aid kit on his pouch, the one that contained a precious dose of nanites. It would take his platoon dose numbers to below fifty, even with the extras from the shuttle.
The crowd parted as he stumbled almost drunkenly towards the older man. The man who had been dreaming of life after the fighting. A tired anger burned through Olaf.
Oh, how he found himself hating conflict and war. He liked Oskar, and when he looked at the wound, he realized it was a large caliber round that had struck the old man. Giving up on opening it with clumsy hands, Olaf tore the first aid pouch from his belt. The Velcro made a ripping sound as it came loose. He dropped to his knees and dumped the contents of the bag next to Oskar.
Quickly sorting through it, hastened by the weakening gasps from Oskar, Olaf found what he was looking for. The bottle of nanite dose. Pouring some of it over the wound on the front, he waited.
Once he saw that nanites were doing their job, he turned the critically injured man to his side and started sprinkling them into the gaping wound on his back. Oskar was lucky not to have been killed instantly. If the injury had been further to the left, there would have been nothing Olaf could have done.
As it was, Olaf was sure a single dose wouldn't allow him to recover fully. The damage had been catastrophic. Without nanites, even with a full pre-Fall surgical team, Oskar would have almost certainly died. The wound on Oskar's back started to seal and fill in. Progress was slow. Olaf had been right. The damage was too much for a single dose of medical nanites.
Seeing the scalpel blade on the ground, Olaf secreted it and opened it in his steadying hands. The glancing blow to his head must have concussed him slightly, but his healing was now kicking in. Behind him, he heard Stasia yelling at everyone to back off. That what could be done would be done.
Olaf needed this man to live and be able. People had seen the wound. They would know it should be fatal. He glanced around and saw Anatoly climbing down the cliff-face on the side of the dell. He was moving too fast for a normal human. If people in the crowd noticed, there could be hell to pay.
If Anatoly
noticed what he was about to do there would also be hell to pay, but Olaf was not going to let Oskar die if he could help it. Hissing slightly as he sliced his palm with the scalpel, Olaf filled the nanite vial with his blood. Dropping the blade, he then placed his bleeding hand at the top of the wound, so the blood would seep down into it.
Waiting, with his hand holding Oskar on his side, Olaf felt the deep cut healing. His blood would be lost among Oskar’s around the wound. Slowly, carefully, he lowered Oskar back to his side. He knew he was breaking the rules. He knew the nanites in his system were different—that they were guaranteed to change someone. Not a potentially lethal one like his mother had endured, but one slowly over time.
Lilith was Lilith. She had kept replication as a high priority in the nanite programming for Boris’s line. So long as the host would survive, and a single nanite remained, it would replicate.
Olaf did not care for the consequences. Either people would accept Oskar when it happened, or Olaf would find him a place in New Romanovka.
It was better than having a man die because of him.
The gurgling gasps subsided to normal breathing. Olaf did not even notice that Anatoly was at his side. Having seen the bloody scalpel on the ground, he retrieved it and slowly placed it in a pocket to deal with later.
Olaf raised the vial of nanites to Oskar’s mouth. Anatoly did not make any comment. Olaf had almost certainly put the cut hand in or over the wound. The damage was already done. All any more of Olaf’s nanites would do now was speed the man’s recovery.
Anatoly hoped on one hand that it had not been simple impulsiveness that had caused Olaf to act. On the other hand, losing even one person in this clusterfuck would be like lighting a fuse leading to a room full of gunpowder.
The group that had gathered around Andrev had drawn weapons on Stasia when her father had fallen. At the same time, a mass of firearms had been pointed at them from all around. A few, including Olaf and Stasia, had rushed to Oskar's aid. There was murder in the eyes of a half-dozen in the group that was still pointing weapons at those who had physically allied themselves with Andrev by proximity.
Redemption (The Boris Chronicles Book 4) Page 10
