The
woods can be a rather miserable place to die. Never did he ever think
this would be the end of his life. Just when Muzhik began to feel
secure in the embrace of the wilderness around him, that was when his
mission got all the more serious. He and Mati had accomplished their
mission. The discovery of the Tree of Life. The Goddess that resided
with the woods they had scouted over and over again.
In this wilderness, all realms of living had the tendency to pass over
one another. Shadows would intersect. Materium and Immaterium would
manage to somehow co-exist in a single space, a shared existence that
could arguably be a different plane entirely.
Far from home, far from Eden. But he would be the flaming sword that
guarded the Tree of Life. How ironic. To think, he was once such a
bitter atheist, never believing in a thing beyond what could be
touched. But the strange things that were once tangible had become so
tangible. A lot of them were in his heart all along.
So why, of all times, when he had found true love and happiness, did it
all have to end? These were the doomed thoughts that bounced inside of
his head, like a small caliber round that ricocheted along the inside
of a skull it just barely punctured through. And like a bullet that had
been reduced to shrapnel, the bite and chewed its way through grey
matter, this thought continued to become more sharp and frayed.
Dozens of his own comrades, auxiliarants that were just recently
assigned to him for this operation, littered the light snow along many
dead tree trunks. This was only the third or fourth time he had seen
snow in the region, as often, it was far more rainy than anything else.
In fact, many frozen rain droplets clung to the pine of the tree
branches that he pushed against, which emitted a soft rustle that set
him on edge as he geared his hearing toward discovering the enemy.
It was just him now. The Fascists had managed to burn the Tree of Life
and still, somehow, it would manage to preserve itself into a new form,
according to the Old Witch. That Baba Yaga could be trusted, he just
knew it. She was so sure of herself, that there was a
solution to the impossible. That life inside charred wood could one day
breathe, breed and exist again. The seed of life was not so easily
extinguished.
But it was the taste for revenge along at the tongues of the Soviet men
that had led to the bold claims that they must pursue the enemy deep
into the woods, before they could escape. The situation had changed
drastically in the last few months.
Once again, Muzhik found himself hopping over logs and shoving through
shrubbery, as he recounted what exactly had gone wrong with the world.
This was not the world that was meant to be, he felt. Some strange pull
had made him think that somehow, whether it was his own actions by
managing to protect the Tree of Life for so long, time had shifted into
a new direction. Perhaps even for the worst.
Some months prior to the attack on the Tree of Life, the Mother Earth
Avatar, the Goddess of the Woods… the Germans had become fully
involved in the war in Spain. How? Largely because the USSR had decided
to finally push its weight fully into the International
Column.
A miracle in its own right, Muzhik was afraid that the in-fighting
among the revolutionaries in Catalonia to Barcelona would have
permanently dented relations, but Stalin proved to be increasingly more
of a wolf than anyone imagined. The man had developed a taste for Cuban
cigars. Cuba sent a fair amount of them to Spain, ironically to Galicia
- where they
had the most pristine and nutritious literal bullshit. A ship would come with cigars, leave with
literal manure, to fertilize the tobacco fields in Cuba - only to repeat the process endlessly. And
while the marxists of the eastern Iberian peninsula struggled to have
adequate food, warmth and guns, magically - there was also cigars and
alcohol.
Those cigars, miraculously, managed to get to Soviet Crimea and
eventually, through on to Kharkov and finally, in Moscow. Where Stalin
had grown a fondness for them. Finally, the Man of Steel found
something he enjoyed more than Bosnian tobacco in a proper pipe.
Some fascist Italian sailors found themselves in a considerable supply
of them too, almost as if that had something to do with the safe
passage of Soviet merchant ships past their own nation.
But this route had been abused. Masterminded by Comrade Yezhov, who
managed to oust Yagoda as the head of the NKVD, the merchant ships
began to carry something back with them on the exit from Crimea and on
the way to Barcelona.
Muzhik knew that the NKVD had infiltrated the Orthodox Church and they
managed to smuggle a fair amount of tobacco through its institutions,
but now he understood the chaos behind it. The cigar smuggling route
began to supply Spain with sizable surplus munitions and weapons. No
longer did the Aragon front remain frozen, as even the most lowly of
partisans suddenly had a reliable Mosin Nagant and a Soviet made steel
helmet.
While it was not entirely true, Muzhik liked to imagine that the
Italian sailors realized that the Soviet merchant ships had far less
excess cigars to offer in bribe and that clued the fascist Axis off to
the fact that the USSR was supplying a very unique type of military
equipment more
openly… in the form of personnel.
The Red Army had truly gone somewhat international. If Trotsky was not
seen as the traitor to all Soviets, he would have been remarkably told
that he rightfully predicted the next movie necessary for the Party.
Alas, someone had apparently raided his villa. The man was shot half a
dozen times. This came a month after someone failed to kill him with an
ice pick.
Mussolini, seemingly unphased by his own disastrous mishandling of
Ethiopia and the failure of making Albania submit to his claims - had
sent a full army over to fight for Franco. At this point, it was no
longer foreign intervention, but war.
The Axis’ heart for imperialism ignited and now, German warships
landed in Galicia. Just when the Aragon front broke and the
Revolutionaries of Madrid crawled their way up. In the center-north,
Franco’s men were encircled and frankly, slaughtered. The Aragon
front managed to sweep across and just went below Euskadi - in hopes of
capturing Galicia, where they got bogged down and forced to retreat
when half of Italy and most of the German military met them
there.
As if it was not bad enough, the Germans sent their best Expeditionary
SS team to the wilderness. France, in a rare show of back bone,
apparently declared war against Germany for escalating the conflict in
Spain to an international one. Meanwhile, America had overturned its
pacifist and non-interventionist policies and currently skirmished with
Japan over islands in micronesia. East and West failed to make ahead of
who was the monster in that war.
It was not even the 40s and the world had begun to tear itself apart.
The British have landed in neutral Denmark, which managed to
righteously angered most of Northern Scandinavia. Just in time for
Soviet forces to catch everyone with their pants down as they
marched into Finland. Apparently, the nation of Brazil had allied
itself with a German colony north of them - thus declaring war against
another colony, apparently owned by… either the Dutch, Belgians
or the French. Honestly, all Muzhik knew was that Brazil had bravely
declared war against nations across the planet with the insane hope
they would come fight for their ports in their ‘Place in the
Sun’.
Canada declared itself independent, no longer a dominion of the UK,
along with New Zealand and Australia. So while the Brits had trampled
Denmark and were actively outside of Nazi German Hamburg, they also had
called India - amidst their own Marxist revolution, fighting Japan in
Burma and also re-colonizing their own colonies.
Yes, this may not have been the history the world was expecting, but
it's hardly any less chaotic than the history it was used to. The
massive scale of these absurdities had made Muzhik realize just how
small he is on the cosmic scale.
But here he was, bleeding from numerous wounds, his glasses shattered,
his right eye closed as it wept crimson… and with four bullets
in his Mosin Nagant. With five enemies to face. Two of them a part of a
machine gun crew, all of them veterans of a war he never heard of in
North Africa alongside the Italians and ran by a lunatic who was only
known as “Hans the
Hands.” For what purpose, did he have such a
ridiculous name? Nothing more than the fact his hands were strangely
bigger than his face, which was mousy and hardly the ideal
‘aryan’ that Hitler so proudly had painted on posters. If
anything, this SS officer resembled the ‘enemies’ in the
fascists’ propaganda posters.
“Russian bastard!” Hans coughed and adjusted his
brille-glasses. Snot caked his poorly-shaven mustache and his lips
pathetically sucked in as he nearly sobbed from the frustration of the
situation. The Fascist wore not their typical leather jackets, these
were soldiers and not political goons. Instead, they wore winter-white
smocks over their woodland flora
trousers and their gaitered-boots. Their stahlhelms were marked with
strange runes rather than just the infamous thunderbolts and other
iconography. “We can kill twenty of the bastards, but not this
one cunt?!”
Esoteric fascists were almost the most amusing. They surely believed
that they could find a goddess and kill it, to gain favor with some
other force? Rather, they just proved that nature would take their time
with the decaying of their bodies.
Sure, there may be decades of conflict, but a fish rots from the head
down. Muzhik knew that even if his people did not win today, Germany
would lose, eventually - everything tomorrow. For now, it was his duty
to make sure at least a few more fascists knew what it was like to be
afraid before they died.
“I want answers! Why can’t we kill this man?!”
Hans’ comically large hands stretched inside of his wool gloves.
The machine gunner and his assistant, who had fastened their
buzzsaw-MG42 along an overturned tree, merely shrugged and frowned
openly. Their little
faces, hidden in their fore-skin like hoods beneath their phallic stahlhelms, reminded Hans that
these were basically children compared to him. But like a child, he would whine again. “Jung!”
Two infantrymen, carrying some bizarre rifles that Muzhik had never
seen before - capable of consecutive and even accurate fully automatic
or semi-automatic fire, had revealed their stationary positions to take
orders from their officer.
“Obersturmführer Wagner!” Jung, a man whose eyes were
as blue as summer sky, was the first to address him. “What are
our orders!”
“To explain to me something simple…” With heaving
shoulders, the officer Wagner managed to calm himself only briefly.
“Why can’t you find this one communist?!”
“He evaded our initial ambush and-”
“And how did he do that?”
“Wagner, sir, he managed to survive our attack and he retreated into the woods before-”
“I was there too and I saw it clearly with my own eyes! As if the
man was protected by some arcane spell, your bullets practically warped
around him!”
That was truly a part of Wagner’s own delusion. In fact, Muzhik
had taken several grazes from the rounds and one clean-through wound,
that was thankfully from a lower caliber MP40. The fascist who carried
said weapon was not so lucky, as a fully sized round, much larger than
a mere 9mm, had split his face down the middle and canoed his entire
visage.
Jung barely had an idea on how to address Wagner in this state. As it
was clear that Obersturmführer Wagner, who was actively suffering
from pneumonia since his arrival in Galicia a few weeks ago - a
condition that only worsened in Euskadi territory, had completely lost
his senses.
“I will find him personally!”
“You will!?”
“Y-yes, yessir!”
With that, Jung saluted and began to march mindlessly toward the treeline.
If I start running once I am out of sight, I can link up with the forces in-
That was the final thought that went through his head before a bullet
pierced his heart from behind. Several in fact, as Wagner preferred the
method of launching a volley of rounds in anger from his
broomstick-stock attached luger pistol.
“Vogel!”
“Y-yessir?!” The remaining expeditionary infantryman,
Vogel, glanced over to his comrades at the machine gun position, who
gave him a firm stare that wished to grant him his courage and
composure. Vogel’s face hardened by the time he returned his gaze
to Wagner.
“Yessir!”
“Do you wish to leave this unit?”
“Not at all, sir!”
“Then pilfer what you can from that brat Jung and
uhhh…” What the hell was he able to do in this situation,
Wagner remembered? “Do your best to cover our retreat.”
Of course, Vogel immediately moved to his own friend’s corpse as
Wagner glanced toward the smoke in the sky, which was somewhat visible
beyond the tips of the trees around them. Parts of the Tree of Life
still burned, that was clear. But then, his hawkish eyes beat down on
the Machinegunners again.
“Eyes front! The communist is the worst kind of rat! Whether he
is in shit, filth, a humid trench - the snow or a rainy bog, he excels
best at crawling on his belly and feasting upon worms to sustain
himself. We are being pursued!” With his arms pushed out wide,
Wagner exclaimed further for emphasis. “He could be absolutely
fuckin’ everywhere and you two idiots are looking at me! What!?
Do I need to show you my cock to make you aim down your sights! Pay
attention, you curs!”
His gloved, large hands pounded his chest and shook what was beneath
his smock. Arrogantly, he wore some of his own medals beneath his
combat uniform. Likely, his formal attire blouse was underneath as
well. The fascists surely imprinted some arrogant ego and pride
into otherwise pathetic men.
“You hear that! That is not just the beat of my heart, those are medals and accolades
which remind you that I am your superior! And we are going to-”
Wagner was caught off by the Russian bullet that took a chip out of his
shoulder. A burst of red blossomed like a flower and disappeared like
scattered petals against the snow. Obersturmführer Wagner tossed
himself around in pain and like a truly brave officer of the fascist
German army, he pissed himself viciously.
“Engaging!” Vogel yelled out, his experimental and yet to
be fully fielded weapon began to spit into the woodline where the shot
had come from. The density of the trees made it hard for him to even
get a silhouette of the target in his sights. Remarkably, the red must
have put some considerable time finding the perfect shot between the
trees that would also give him sizable cover and concealment. Not only
that, he likely had multiple locations to switch to and to. Weaving in
and out of the trees. “He’s one of those damn Siberians,
probably! Eastern mutts know woodlands like they do their aunt’s
tits!”
“What?!” Machinegunner Roth questioned.
“He’s talking about incest again, just fire the gun!” Ordered Roth’s assistant, Graf.
Bullets rained into the tree lines more than any flake of snow could
muster. Wood splintered and echoed through this land, long familiar
with the sound of steel striking trunks. But it was often axes and not
lead. Damnable, the wilderness would not allow the fascist invaders to
harm its honoured guest.
And truly, as Vogel began to traverse the trees in a violent and
proactive search for the communist rifleman, it felt like the trees
warped and changed in their positioning all around him. At some point,
he stopped and realized that when he looked behind him, he was deeper
into the woods than it was physically possible.
Isolated, forced away, Vogel continued to search absent mindedly as he
assumed that he just had adrenaline that coursed through his veins and
had made his hot blood that much more boiled. It had to be
tunnel-vision, he thought. There was no way the pagan woods would not
favor his men, whose helmets were marked with runes, in favor of some
godless atheist.
“The hell…” Vogel had wandered for nearly five
minutes and with each blink of his eye, he was farther into nothingness
and farther from anything remotely similar. Still, muted - as if they
were just a memory that slipped into a waking dream, he could hear the
experimental lightmachinegun buzz rounds into wood.
It reminded him of a moment, when he was a child, he had gotten lost in
the Bayerischer Wald. The woods just at the border of Bavaria. So green
and inviting, full of life. Suddenly, the snow around him was gone and
he was a child, no older than nine years, in the Bayerischer Wald.
Lost and without any sense of direction, it was almost like the forest
called to him with the sound of a woodpecker, no - dozens of
woodpeckers, planting their beaks into the trees at once. Joyfully and
no longer afraid, the young Vogel ran toward the sound and uncovered
the scene for himself.
“Wow… just…” Amazed. There was no bitter man
with a rifle in his hand any longer. The woods had changed to his
purest memory. His beautiful dream of his own personal eden.
All around him, tens of thousands of woodpeckers, that persistently and
with synchronized rhythm, plundered the trees that would regenerate
endlessly. A chorus of chirps and thousands of pecks against wood.
“Yes! Yes!” He clapped, as if it were a performance.
The gods of nature had blessed him and he twirled around, only to find
himself older. Yes, in a long jacket, he was suddenly in the woods
behind his parents’ home. Confused being in his teenaged body
once more, once again - the call of a woodpecker brought him further
into the now, much more brown wilderness.
There, he was ambushed. A beautiful blonde woman with pigtails and some
rather rustic, rural dress. The most gorgeous of diamonds in the rough.
While not conventionally beautiful by the standard of those bastard
Berliners, Vogel loved the gaunt face of this lady named Sabine and her
freckled nose, round glasses to match his own.
“Come, come!” She called to him, holding his hands and the
two danced in circles around a stump. The chorus of woodpeckers got
louder. “Dance! Dance! Dance!”
“Yes, yes, I will!” Vogel’s happiness was impossible to deny. He smiled so hard he could cry.
And then, the woodpeckers stopped. A strike of lightning replaced the
wooden chops and now everything was bathed in blue. Above, the sky was
muddied with blackened clouds of dark grey. It looked as though the
Earth had begun to cry. Rain softly pelted the ground around him, but
audibly formed the silhouette of something behind him.
He turned to find nothing. And as he glanced back, the rain roared and
thundered all around him in an instant. But the girl was gone.
“Hello!? Sabine?!” There was no sign of her. In a panic, he
began to charge through the woods. “Sabine! Sabine!”
And then, something hit his face. But it was not a branch. It was something far more morbid.
A girl’s feet, clad with blue shoes. As his eyes trailed upward
the pale leg, he saw the nude corpse of Sabine - hung from a tree.
“No! No!” Why did the Woods tell him of this night again?!
He wished to forget, he wished to forget! “No! No! They
didn’t know!”
With misery, Vogel’s face planted itself into his hands. How
could they do that to her? How could he do that to her? She was older,
he couldn’t recognize her! The freckles, how could he forget? How
could he forget?! But now he wished he could forever again.
And as his misery became deeper and darker, more and more bodies hung
from trees around him. More and more ladies and men alike. Mothers,
fathers, daughters, sisters, brothers, friends, lovers… People
with names, histories, families. God, how long had he been a part of
these horrific deeds?! Some of these faces were familiar, as distorted
as they were.
The further he ran into the woods, the closer he was catching up to
himself. By the end of the endless rows of suspended corpses, he saw
the faces of men and women and even children, from Galicia to Euskadi.
His reign of terror from beginning to end.
And finally, he had escaped it all. Having seen what the woods wanted him to see.
Panting, he dusted off his knee and found himself bathed in the
sunlight above, that broke the cover of the trees. The smell of pine
filled his nose and… there was some light snow on the ground.
In his panicked sweat, he had removed his helmet and hood. With a sigh,
he realized that he was far away from his comrades now. Mindlessly, he
pursued the ghost of that red into nothing and now, if there were still
gunshots being exchanged, he could not even hear the faintest echo.
There was no point in slinging his rifle, he let it fall into the wet
grass. He breathed and breathed, glad that the cold air could cool his
flushed face. What a nightmare he had escaped. And then…
Chukchukchukchuk!
His eyes widened. Vogel couldn’t believe it at first, but there it was. A Middle-spotted Woodpecker. Leiopicus medius. Native to the Basque country.
And as he often did, he reached into his trouser’s left pocket,
where he pushed aside some additional rounds and tugged out a small,
leather bound journal of sorts. Normally, these were for writing down
important notes and as he flipped through the pages, which had seen
wear and tear from all the environments he had been, some of them out
right flaking from water damage - he eventually got to his sketches.
A pencil, dulled and flat, was pulled from the small inner sleeve. He
reached down to his boot and from it, he pulled out his Hitler Youth
blade. Blut und Ehre was the motto imprinted on
the blade itself.
With it, he quickly sharpened the pencil. Sure, he circumcised most of
it and had barely gotten a proper edge on the charcoal, but it would
have to do. The blade was then discarded alongside the rifle. This
sketch was far more important.
Vogel held the most genuine smile he had ever had on his face in years,
since he had become the man that was capable of doing only what people
like himself could do. Slowly but surely, the rendering of the
Middle-spotted woodpecker took shape in a fairly photo-realistic way.
“What should I name you?” He asked out loud, before the
Soviet-made, 50-grain SST polymer-tipped bullet split his head like an
egg cracked along the rim of a pan. From ear to ear, temple to temple,
Vogel’s head practically became two halves of one egg and the
yoke poured out, but was hardly red.
“Tschh…” Muzhik exhaled and ran over to the body
once he knew he was in the clear. “Bastards like you don’t
deserve even a minute of being human before you die…
There’s no such thing as dying pure here.” Although, he did
wonder what the woods chose to show him in
those moments to distract him so much.
The man had little things of value. Clearly, their ambush earlier had
atrophied their resources. Vogel’s strange rifle had not a single
round in its magazine - a truly revolutionary addition to an infantry
rifle. Nor did it have a round in the chamber. Admittingly, Muzhik
would have an easier time learning how to operate a train on the fly
than this rifle from the future. Surely, time was upside down.
As for the spare rounds in the fascist’s pocket, hardly anything
compatible with the Mosin Nagant. Useless, in other words.
“Dammit…” Muzhik cringed as his wounds bled once
more. The woods just barely kept him alive. “Let’s get to
it then…” He motivated himself as he began the ruck back
to his own personal frontline of his own personal war.
Roth and Graf examined the body of Wagner, as they both shared,
interchangeably, their last cigarette - one packed by themselves, of
course. They did not have the luxury of preserving any of the Spanish-
packaged ones, for that contraband was smoked before they even arrived in this part of the country.
“Just like that, huh?”
“Yeah, just like that.” Graf spat onto Wagner’s
chest. “All those medals and the bastard just lead us into
hell.”
With relaxed shoulders, Roth chuckled at the terribleness of the
situation. The wider set man’s voice was boomingly louder than
Graf’s could ever be. “Ha… What the hell. I never
thought we’d be burning goddesses alive, witches, sure, but
Mother Nature herself? Wagner made us all into monsters…”
“We already were.” Corrected Graf. His thin face was
scratched idly by his bare hand, having just removed it from his wool
glove so he could enjoy the texture of the cigarette. The warmth near
its end had reminded him fondly of last night’s fireplace, rather
than the fire they started today. “Our own little smoke is just
about over and the smoke above is clearing out. Seems that the Goddess
wasn’t going to burn entirely after all. We really underestimated
her.”
“Even if burned the whole Tree of Line down, we’d never get to its roots in the Earth…”
Roth shook his head and looked back to the machinegun position.
“Burned her, only to get burned ourselves and now we burn our
last smoke before we burn out. Burned the barrel and burned the rest of
our ammo…”
With a smirk, Graf shrugged toward Wagner, who was as stiff as the snow around him.
“What?” Questioned Roth, confused by the gesture, clearly
as he finished off the cigarette with a final drag - the remnants of
the tobacco and paper being flicked away without caution.
“Suggesting something?”
“He has a few rounds in his pistol…”
“Enough to shoot ourselves with, I hope.” The dark joke
from Roth had the two men smiling as they approached the body of their
officer with abandon for decency.
Once the handgun was stolen from the body, Graf mockingly aimed it
toward the obviously dead Wagner and pretended to shoot him with a
mouth-generated ‘Pow’ sound effect. Really, there was no
point in thinking that he’d suddenly spring alive or something.
The guy was hardly a vampire.
“Ayy… Looks like Vogel didn’t take Jung’s
stielhandgranate…” Mentioned Roth as he now approached the
other corpse of yet another comrade, the German formally known as Jung.
“Heh… he always said he hated the things. Claimed the
‘boom’ always scared away the birds, as if the gunshots
didn’t!”
“Well…” With some self-reassurance, it was now Graf
who pounded his chest a little. “We’re alive and he
isn’t. Most likely. We have a chance still.”
“You think you do?!”
A foreign voice had staggered their confidence. With hardly any cover
to hide behind, the two practically just crouched beside Wagner.
Briefly, Roth considered if he was stiff enough to hold up like a
literal human shield.
“That fuckin’ red is taunting us!” Graf barked.
“Or it's the woods playing tricks again… same things that made Wagner go mad.”
“Hell with that shit!” The suggestion was discarded harshly
by Graf, who aimed the pistol toward the tree line. “Come on out,
you little dog! It is time to put you down!”
“Fine, have it your way, you cowards!” The way
Muzhik’s voice resonated among the trees, made it practically
impossible to determine where he was. “Hope you had enough time
to pray to your little Mozart or whoever, there… you are in my
neck of the woods now and the woods doesn’t play nice with
strangers!”
“Oh yeah?!” Honestly, Graf was a bit bitter that the
red’s German was so stellar. Clearly someone who had read Das Kapital
in its native print. “These woods don’t even belong to you!
And we’ll make sure that it stays that way, so how about you go
pray to your Marx or whoever, you stupid Siberian monkey!”
“There’s no monkeys in Russia, you stupid bastard!”
Replied Muzhik and honestly, Roth would have to agree with that.
“He’s right, they don’t even have them in
zoos…” Roth tapped his chin as he began to inch toward
Vogel’s body from his crouched position. “Do the red even
have zoos…?”
“Their whole country is a zoo of lesser creatures, Roth.”
The ideals of Graf were confirmed in that instance. He raised himself
up slightly higher just to glance into the woods some more - hoping to
see some hint of this remaining bastard, so that he may be killed.
“How are we losing to some one eyed Soviet?!”
“The woods must be seeing for him…”
“Knock it off with that shit!”
The pistol, despite its stock, hardly turned it into a proper
substitute for a rifle. But this brand of luger was especially
fantastic and how it naturally allowed the hand to aim. Transfixed on
the front sights, Graf actually lost focus for a second and suddenly, a
burst of white emerged from the tree line.
A brunette in a white dress with a red face, danced toward him. She was
old, but still had full colour to her cheeks and her hair. Gracefully,
like a whimsical, angelic apparition, the flowing fabrics that
constituted the otherworldly shape of the lady had made Graf completely
transfixed.
“Mother?!” He called out. Yes, even though he knew from
letters from his father while he was stationed briefly in Galicia that
she had just passed away, there she was before him. She was still the
graceful ballerina that his dad fell in love with all those years ago.
“Mother?! Is that you?!”
“Don’t let the woods mess with your eyes, Graf!”
Warned Roth as he crawled like a lowly farm animal toward Jung’s
body, which was just as cold and stiff as Wagner’s now.
“Actually, keep distracting the red, go ahead! Go crazy! See if I
care!”
“Moooother!? You have father worried sick!” Graf grinned
through the pain of it all, the tears warmed his cold face. It was all
going to be okay, his mother bloomed toward him like a flower. And just
as quickly as she appeared…
She transformed. No, she was ripped in half.
The scene had become a propaganda poster. Roaring like a beast, Muzhik
charged through the ghostly image of the man’s mother, captured
like a living photograph, frozen in time… and Graf’s
wishful delusion was ripped like paper.
But he was used to shooting at paper. Furious that the woods had lied
to him, Graf tugged the trigger and let a few rounds clip through the
man that charged at him. In the end, it did not stop Muzhik from
piercing him with the pig-sticker bayonet of his rifle.
“You’re… not her… kerkof! Father will be…” Coughed Graf. “So disappointed…”
The snow-white smock quickly reddened, like wine spilled upon a
tablecloth. Muzhik grinded and tested the bayonet deep past his ribs
and pulled the trigger. Which was enough to practically toss the body
of Graf from his mounted pike at the end of his rifle.
“Gahhh…” Muzhik’s vision was fading quickly
and his mouth was full of warmth, as his eyes also became wrapped in
the embrace of pain’s bitter tears. Several shots had cut him
down some more, but he still lived by the blessing of the woods - for
whatever reason. “One…more…”
With the Mosin at his hip briefly, he worked the bolt- ejected the
spent casing and chambered the round. His words had forgotten what they
were meant for. One more bullet left? Or one more fascist left to go?
Desperately, Roth sprung from his meager crawlings into a sprint. He
wished to get to Jung’s corpse and the grenade before the woods
could ever show him a single dream. But that was when he pushed his
arms out and…
Felt the loving embrace of something. Roth had no idea what he had held
onto, but all he knew was that he felt warm and loved. There was still
a terrible, screaming pain from his back and through his chest - but
someone had hugged him closer than anyone alive ever had.
“I’m proud of you, brother…”
“Ohhh… it's you…” Roth whispered, his teeth
becoming red. “Carry me on your back, take me home… I fell
off the tractor again.”
Muzhik panted as he ejected the casing from his rifle one last time. He
stumbled toward the body of Roth, which pathetically hugged the corpse
of Jung after he had been shot. Honestly, Muzhik was surprised he was
able to shoot a man through the back and across his
heart from his hip like that. Or did he just not realize that he managed to find the strength in his
arms to raise the rifle? As of now, Muzhik’s arms could barely work the bolt.
To ensure the man was dead, he mustered enough strength to flip Roth
over. The front of the man was plastered red and there was,
surprisingly, hardly a peaceful expression on his face. Rather, he
looked pained, guilty and embarrassed. Bashful.
“Heh… even in your dreams, you fascists can’t get
enough of shame…” Muzhik blinked hard and suddenly focused
on something within the curled hand of Roth.
Muzhik instantly recognized the German made stielhandgranate. It had
been used throughout the conflict in Spain and it was a remarkably
identifiable infantry weapon for the fascist side. The grenade was
shaped like a tin cylinder, a belt clip on one side and the mount was a
simple wooden handle that was fairly hollow. The top was screwed in and
simply, once the metal cover was removed, the wire pull mechanism
inside would set the fiction lighter and ignite the internal fuse.
It was such a cruel bit of fate, that no dream from the woods could
make him feel better. Instead, a superhuman amount of strength suddenly
overcame the entire body of Muzhik. But not enough to make his legs run.
He kicked the body over again, forcing Roth’s corpse to lay upon
the grenade and over and over - into his already blooded back, Muzhik
stabbed the fascist with his pig-sticker until the snow around them was
as bright red as his vision.
“Stupid!”
Schtab.
“Fascist!”
Schtab! Schlerk!
“Bastard!”
Schunk~!
And then the grenade kicked the snow into the air and there was only
the taste of something metallic in his mouth. But upon further
thinking, it could have just been his own blood.