by Joe Hart
The officer with the silver SS on his collar stopped a few yards from the ditch and the people that lined it, and then stood looking at their backs. He glanced to his left and nodded a quick approval to his Blockwart, who in turn dipped his head and stepped back several steps.
The officer’s heart was beginning to pump at a quickened pace, as it always did. It had been some time since he had allowed himself release. Only so much could be tolerated from a commanding officer, even in a place such as this. If too many rumors were to reach the wrong ears, the solidity of his command would be questioned. But now that the end was this close, why not? He could hear the storm that would soon sweep through the camp to the west, and when it did, none of this would matter. It was a deeper stain within an already-bloody wound.
He looked to his right and left, making eye contact with the soldiers standing there. He made sure they understood why they were positioned where they were, and then approached the first figure in the long line. It was a man with fairly wide shoulders and an upright posture. He stood with purpose, with dignity. The officer nodded to himself and looked down at the white snow beneath his feet, unblemished and pure.
The officer stopped several feet behind the first man and waited. He could tell the man had heard him approach. He knew the prisoner wasn’t one of the already-broken by the way the man’s hands were balled into fists. The officer’s eyes narrowed and his breathing slowed as the man before him turned his head slightly. The prisoner’s shoulders slumped somewhat and the officer heard him exhale. Good, the officer thought as his hands rested on the black handles at his waist, at least we’re on the same page.
In a clumsy swinging motion, the man at the head of the line turned and lunged at the officer behind him. His gaunt face was drawn tight in a grimace of hate, and the anticipated blow, either from a fist or a bullet. The officer took one step back, and there was a flash of silver in the winter light. The man who had rushed him stopped as if he had hit a wall and straightened, his hands flying suddenly to his throat in a gesture of surprise. The prisoner licked his lips and his eyebrows drew down in a scowl of concentration. He pulled one hand away from his neck, and then the other. He blinked several times, but when he licked his lips again, there was blood on them.
A gash abruptly opened beneath the prisoner’s jaw like a red smile. Skin, esophagus, and muscle had been slit wide, and the gap continued to open, seeming that it would not stop. Blood gushed from the wound and flowed over the man’s hands in front of his eyes. Gallons seemed to escape from his throat in an elegant stream, as if poured from a pitcher. His fingers cut the flow into cascades, and he weakly began to cup the life that surged from within him.
The prisoner blinked one last time and then stumbled backward as his senses tried to maintain balance. He fell in a heap at the base of the trench behind him. His legs twitched twice as his final stores of blood escaped and ran with the grade of the earth through the wet snow.
The officer’s face split in a maniacal grin, his teeth clenched together and his blue eyes open wide to the scene before him. The lush redness of the blood on the stark white of the snow held his gaze, and he realized he could have stared for hours into the almost-black pool near his feet. A long-bladed knife that ended in a thick, chopping point extended from his right hand, and a small line of blood slid off its tip in short drops.
The people in line recoiled reflexively, as if they were made of a solid spring and a shock echoed down through their ranks. Some were screaming, while others began to cry but refused to look at the corpse in the ditch, their eyes squeezed shut, letting only tears escape. The soldiers at either end of the ditch began yelling instructions, telling them to stay where they were. The people fearfully eyed the officer, and then the muzzles of the guns that were trained on them, almost as if they were measuring each up to see which might be a better choice.
The boy’s view of the carnage had been blocked as the adults before him shifted, and thus he hadn’t seen what had transpired. Only now did he see that a man had fallen into the ditch and he seemed to be hurt.
At the far end of the line, the officer slowly came to his senses and became aware of the movement in the line of people. Without a word, he nodded again to the soldiers as he began to stalk to the next man in the line.
The officer pulled another, thinner, blade out from a sheath on his left as he strode up to a man who was in his late sixties. The man held his hands up in a defensive gesture, his long white hair flying wildly in the air, and began to plead with the officer as he approached. Without hesitation, the officer lunged forward and slid the long, thin blade up to the handle into the old man’s right eye. The eye punctured with a soft puff and deflated on the blade as the man’s body went rigid and then collapsed to the ground.
The officer marveled at how little blood escaped the man’s wound, as he stepped over the corpse and began to bear down on a woman who had fallen to her knees in the snow. In the recesses of his mind that weren’t filled with the sound of his own heart’s hammering, he began to hear gunfire.
The boy at the end of the line weaved back and forth as he tried to make out what the confusion was and why people were yelling. His mother had turned and was looking in the direction he was, with one hand clamped tightly over her mouth, as if she were about to be sick and could hold it at bay if she pushed hard enough at her face. His father was also staring at the other end of the line, and hadn’t moved a muscle until the gunshots began to cut the air with their short barks of sound. Several people tried to run out of the line, and the soldiers shot them. Their bodies fell in the snow and red began to creep outward through the white in a bright corona.
Fear began to invade the boy’s body, as his legs locked tight and he gripped his mother’s hand. She squeezed back without taking her eyes off the spectacle in front of her.
The officer wove his way down through the line in a blur of motion. His arms pinwheeled crazily at times, and snapped in short strikes at others. Blood flew in arcs and began to coat his dark uniform in splattered gore. As he cut one woman’s face from jaw to opposite eyebrow, he noticed there were many bodies falling not only in the ditch but also to the level ground on which he stood. The soldiers around him were doing well. Only the people who ran or tried to fight were shot, but most were too shocked or frightened to react. He cut these people down like wheat before a scythe.
As the officer approached a man who appeared completely dazed—his slight form hunched over and his eyes staring blankly at the ditch in front of him—the man suddenly turned with a ragged scream and began to flee. His rag-swaddled feet pounded large footprints in the snow as he ran from the pit. A soldier to the officer’s right paused as he watched the emaciated man run away, seemingly entranced by the speed at which the prisoner was escaping.
“Shoot him!” the officer screamed into the young soldier’s ear. The soldier flinched but brought the machine gun to bear on the running man’s back. Bullets sprayed from the barrel of the gun, and the escaped man pitched forward into the snow, with his arm hanging off his body at a strange angle. From where the officer stood, it looked as though only a few inches of meat attached the limb to the starved body that now lay twitching on the ground.
The officer spun in a tight turn and slit the throat of another prisoner who stood a few feet to his left. The blood that flew from the wound sprayed into a fine haze that settled in the chilled air like a mist descending over a cold field. The officer watched the blood spray fall to the ground and paint the snow a faint pink among the deeper reds. It was simply art. There was no other way to describe it. The way the substance ran from the skin when cut. How it soaked into the ground, how it pooled so black. He knew his own veins were pumping the same liquid.
Without pausing as he bore down on the next person in line, he slit his right wrist just enough to allow a small stream to escape, to fall among the rest and mix into the abstract masterpiece he was painting on the ground.
The boy’s mother and father began t
o back up. Something was very wrong, the boy knew. People still screamed and fell down. He looked up imploringly at his mother, but her face was turned toward his father, who stared intently into her eyes. His father’s mouth was drawn straight across his narrow face like a pale gash. His eyes were wide behind his glasses, and he now held his wife’s other hand in both of his own. Something was passing between them, the boy knew. His mother and father weren’t talking, but things were being said. After another moment like this, his father nodded and looked down into his face. The boy felt a pang of panic that rose sharply above all the other fears that barraged his senses. It was like a spike of electricity running through his mind that cut off all other thought. His father smiled, and the boy reached out to him. It was a desperate act, the reaction of someone falling from the deck of a ship into roiling waters. His father squeezed his hand for one beat, two, then released it, at the same time letting go of the connection with his wife.
A soldier stood several yards to the father’s right, toward the center of the camp, the same direction the fleeing prisoner had tried to escape. The soldier’s face was drawn up in a grimace of disgust, his eyes narrowed into slits, as arc after arc of blood flew into the air farther down the line. The boy’s father stepped calmly toward the soldier, his hands held by his sides. When the soldier didn’t turn or notice him, the boy’s father leapt in his direction and grasped the rounded edges of the other man’s machine gun. A moment too late, the soldier realized what was happening and tried to pull the gun back from the boy’s father. With a swift movement that seemed uncorrelated with his physical state, the boy’s father slammed the gun up and into the soldier’s nose, breaking it and knocking him to the ground. The two men fell heavily, the soldier onto his back and the boy’s father on top of him. The soldier’s eyes fluttered for a moment as blood began to pour from his broken nose, and the boy’s father used the momentary lull to pull the gun’s sling up and over the supine man’s head.
Without pausing, he slammed the butt of the gun into the downed soldier’s face, silencing him, smashing his already-broken nose completely flat. As he regained his feet, he heard a stillness in the air. For a moment he wondered why this would bother him. Then he realized that there were no more screams filling the air. He breathed in and out as he listened to the footsteps that approached from behind. The seconds stretched into millennia as the boy’s father stared at the far end of the camp where a supply truck sat idling. There was a small patch of paint missing from the truck’s front fender. Edges of rust were beginning to erode the metal, and he could see every intricate layer of the orange disease in minor detail. He could see each individual snowflake as it fell, and he imagined he could discern the pattern the ice crystals formed as the flakes floated to the ground. He heard another footstep fall and he spun, preparing to fire.
The heavy-bladed knife cut through his wrist as easily as a line through water. The officer stood several feet away, crouched and ready to deliver another blow, as the disembodied hand fell to the pallid earth. It landed between the two men, and the fingers curled in on the palm like a dying spider’s legs. The boy’s father tried to bring the machine gun to bear on the blood-spattered SS officer just as he saw silver bloom into life on his right side. The slim blade in the officer’s left hand sliced cleanly into the paltry flesh of the father’s forearm. It carved off a long, slender chunk of tissue, the rigid blade skittering on the bone. The chunk also fell to the ground, causing the nerves in the man’s arm to twitch.
The machine gun shuddered as it spit a dashed line of bullets into the ground and then into his wife’s flesh. The boy heard several hollow thuds and felt something warm splash onto the top of his head. He blinked as whatever was in his hair began to run into his eyes. As he released his mother’s hand to wipe at his face, he heard an anguished scream, full of sorrow and grief. He didn’t know what tore loose inside of him and ached from that sound, but it centered on the scene before him, like the needle of a compass pointing north.
His father stood staring at the sky, one hand limply holding the machine gun. The dull metal fell from his grasp to the white ground. The other arm pumped a jet of blood out of the stump where his hand used to be. The officer stood several feet away, the knives in each hand dripping blood.
The boy’s mother stumbled backward. As she tried to maintain her footing, her eyes roamed wildly in her skull. Soon they met her son’s and held them. They bulged with pain and sadness, and when the boy looked down, he saw several large blotches of blood spreading across her abdomen. She blinked once and opened her mouth to say something into the cold air, but without uttering a sound, she fell away and flopped limply into the ditch behind her.
The boy turned just in time to see a blur of motion where his father stood. The officer had leapt toward the other man in a single stride and then lithely stepped off to the side, his left arm swinging down in a graceful curve. The boy watched his father’s frozen face grimace. Then his father’s head tipped at a right angle onto his shoulder, a thin strap of skin and sinew the only things keeping his head from falling off completely. Blood surged from the wound like floodwater from a broken dam, and his father’s legs unhinged, his lifeless body crumpling in a heap of rags and sharp-angled limbs.
Silence pervaded the grounds and soaked into every surface therein. The pressure that had been building seemed to coalesce into a sharp zenith that pushed the surrounding soldiers down and made several cover their ears, as though a sound were causing the heaviness they felt, though nothing could be heard in the damp air.
The boy stood staring at the officer’s back, which, surprisingly, was free of gore. The officer, in turn, was watching the last of the man’s blood seep away, when he felt the eyes of the boy on him. He turned, and they stood facing each other, their gazes locked. The boy’s jaw clenched and unclenched mechanically, while the officer’s face remained slack and unmoving. The snow fell between them like a lace curtain. An eternity ticked by, and then the officer began to move. He strode across the distance between them, his hands close to his sides.
The boy seemed almost in a trance as his parents’ killer approached with quickening footsteps. His eyes clouded over with delayed shock, and his muscles slackened from their earlier constriction. The officer recognized acceptance in the little boy’s posture, and he readied himself for his last execution of the day—and for all he knew, the war.
When he was within a few feet of the boy, the officer drew back his arm and twisted his body as he slung the blade in his right hand in a viscous sweeping motion. The boy reacted, stepped back, and teetered on the edge of the ditch. His arms automatically came out to balance him as he fell, and the blade flashed brightly in and out of his line of sight while pain bloomed on his left cheek.
The officer watched as his knife missed its mark—the boy’s neck—and cut a deep line in his cheek and across the bridge of his nose instead. The boy tipped back, arms flailing, and fell onto the corpse of his mother in the trench behind him. He struggled there, on his mother’s still-warm body, as he tried to right himself. The officer watched with a degree of amusement while he tried to decide whether to venture in after his quarry or to pull his sidearm and dispatch the boy where he lay. He was still trying to choose when he realized that a high whining sound was invading the relative quiet of the camp around him.
A plane came in fast and low from the bleak western horizon. At first it could have been mistaken for a large black vulture or a bird of prey. But as it neared the camp, the white and black outline of a five-pointed star could be seen on its fuselage. Smoke billowed from both wings and from several places over the engine cowling. A clever artist had drawn a gaping mouth lined with teeth along the front of the aircraft behind the sputtering propeller. The P-40 dropped lower and lower, until the whine of the failing engine became a roar that overrode even the concussive pressure in the soldiers’ heads. A few tried to run, while others simply fell onto the freezing ground.
The officer watched the pla
ne as it dove sharply, directly toward the spot where he stood. With only a split second to spare, he jumped to his left and rolled several times as the sound of the plane’s engine shrieked against altitude and ate up the air around him.
The plane smashed into the ground several feet beyond the edge of the ditch, inside the camp’s fences. Metal rent and chunks of the aircraft flew hundreds of yards in different directions. The heavy three-bladed prop tore free of its anchoring, and as it stuttered hastily across the wet ground, it cut through the Blockwart’s body, leaving the two gaping halves, once a man, to tip apart. Flying shrapnel wounded a number of other soldiers, and a fireball erupted as the remaining gas in the plane’s tanks caught fire.
The officer blinked his eyes into the cold mud below the layer of sleet that he was lying on. He pushed his gloved hands into the ground and sat up. His ears rang with the explosion, and his vision titled as he tried to regain his feet. His hat had been lost when he dove, and his light blond hair stuck up at odd angles above his pallid face. He looked around at the grounds and saw many of the soldiers that were assisting him earlier lying in pieces, their insides turned out in a shocking display. Smoking chunks of meat still clung to the burning bones of the plane fifty yards away, and he heard screaming from the injured.
He turned and looked down at the trench before him, at the bodies now covered with a slight layer of dirt and sleet from the impact of the plane.
The boy wasn’t there.
His eyes scanned up and down the tangled limbs in the depression, searching for movement among the dead. He even looked for a body with an unnatural arch to it, just in case the boy had burrowed beneath one of the corpses to hide as he had seen done several times.
