“Give me your finger, please,” the man said. With a small sigh, Konstantin did. He couldn’t begin to remember how many times he’d got stuck since he came here. One more went on the list he wasn’t keeping.
He’d taken more wounds, real wounds, than he could keep track of in this war and the last one. Gunshots, fragments, burns…He’d known some serious pain. Next to all that, a little poke with the lancet should have been as nothing. But it wasn’t. It hurt, every single time.
As the doctor smeared his blood onto the slide and put a cover glass over it, Konstantin asked him about that. “Is it my imagination?” he wondered.
“Nyet,” the doctor said, sounding very Russian indeed for one word. “For one thing, hands have more nerves than other parts of the body. For another, most wounds happen when you do not look for them. You know I shall stick you. You almost feel it before it happens.”
“What do you know?” Konstantin said thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “That makes sense. Thanks, Doc.” He wasn’t in the habit of thanking Germans, but he did here.
“It is nothing.” The doctor put the slide with Morozov’s blood on it into the breast pocket of his white coat. One of the things radiation poisoning did to you was give you a fierce anemia. They took all the blood counts to see how people came back from it.
When the German came to the sick, bald artilleryman in the next bed, the fellow sang out: “Here’s the vampire again!”
The Red Army soldiers in the ward laughed, Konstantin as loud as any of them. The doctor’s smile was the kind you used when you wanted to clout the guy you were smiling at. “It is necessary so that we may help you regain your health again,” he said primly.
“Sure, pal, but it’s still no fun,” the artilleryman said, echoing what Konstantin had been thinking.
Lunch was stewed liver. Liver stew, liver cooked with onions, chopped liver, liver dumplings, liver paste (that one had been a favorite German ration in the last war)…The cooks fed the men with radiation sickness every kind of liver dish they could come up with. They said it helped build blood. About the only things they didn’t do were drip it in with a needle and serve it in suppository form.
Konstantin liked liver. Or rather, he had liked liver. He’d taken plenty of those tinfoil tubes of liver paste off dead Fritzes. He’d enjoyed them, too. They’d tasted like victory. Now…If they ever let him out of here, he didn’t think he’d ever touch the stuff again. He’d had it up to there, and then some.
But at least he could think about escaping this place. Compared to how he’d felt when he got here, that was progress with a capital P.
–
Advancing! Gustav Hozzel wasn’t used to advancing against the Russians. Last time around, he’d started fighting in the east just about when the Germans began their long, bitter, grinding withdrawal toward and then into the Vaterland. He’d lived through his first couple of scrapes as much by luck as anything else. After that, he’d started to see what he needed to do.
By the time the war ended, he was one of the hard-bitten veterans who kept the Reich on its feet for a year, maybe even a year and a half, after it should have fallen over. He’d retreated from somewhere near Rostov-on-Don to Germany, almost every centimeter of the way on foot.
He’d hardly ever gone forward. Oh, local counterattacks sometimes took back a few square kilometers of lost ground, but never for long. Things had worked the same way in this new war, too. There were just too many Russians. There were always too many Russians.
But if you blew a swarm of them to hell at once…Of course, the drawback to that was that the Amis had also blown a swarm of Gustav’s countrymen to hell. They hadn’t done that as long as they saw any chance of hanging on to West Germany. Once they didn’t see that chance any more, they didn’t hesitate, either.
Gustav’s regiment moved east through the wreckage of Wesel two days after the bomb fell there. He had no idea whether that was safe. All his time in Russia had taught him not to ask inconvenient questions.
It was even worse than he’d expected. He knew what bombs did. He’d seen plenty of cities smashed flat from the air, and from the ground. He’d helped scorch Russian earth himself.
But the center of Wesel wasn’t just knocked into ruins, the way ordinary bombs did. It wasn’t just scorched, either, or even baked. It was incinerated, melted. The stump of the cathedral spire left after Russian guns bit off the top and the observers up there had flowed like candle wax. Stone wasn’t supposed to do that, dammit.
In his pocket, Gustav carried a little piece of greenish glass-melted rock and concrete-he’d picked up near the doubly destroyed spire. He wanted something to remember Wesel by, and that seemed to fit. It was probably radioactive, but he hoped it wasn’t too radioactive.
To his surprise, Rolf was all for the atom bombs. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” said the ex-LAH man, who wasn’t long on original thoughts. “As long as we kill Russians, what else matters?”
“You don’t have any relatives in Wesel, do you?” Max Bachman asked, beating Gustav to the punch.
“If I did, I’d rather see them dead than living under the Bolsheviks,” Rolf said. The really scary thing was, Gustav believed him.
Right under where the bomb went off, they found no dead at all. The A-bomb had simply erased them, as it had erased much of Wesel. As they moved farther east, they did come across corpses, but so charred and shrunken that Gustav had no idea whether they were men or women, Germans or Russians.
A little farther on yet, the bodies were burned and melted, but still recognizable as human beings. As far as Gustav was concerned, that was worse. A flamethrower might do such things, but to a few people at a time, not to hundreds or thousands at once. The smell was more of roasted meat than dead meat, though the latter was starting to gain.
They went past Russian tanks that could have blasted them to hell had anyone inside them remained alive. But the men in there were dead, and so were the tanks. The ones closer to the A-bomb had cannons that drooped like limp dicks. Farther away, they looked ready to go-but they weren’t.
Then the advancing Germans came across people who weren’t dead but who wished they were. Atomic fire could do things to bodies not even flamethrowers matched. Eyes seared and welded to cheeks…Several soldiers gave the coup de grace to horribly burned men and women who thanked them for it.
Gustav had done that in Russia. He’d always hoped someone would do it for him if he needed it. This was worse, somehow. That line from the Poe story wouldn’t get out of his mind. And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
“If this is what winning looks like, I’m not sure I want anything to do with it,” he said, hoping the last rations he’d eaten would stay down.
Rolf snorted. “Oh, come off it, man! Do you think the Ivans haven’t done the same thing wherever they could?” Gustav couldn’t answer that. He knew they had.
Here and there, Red Army men and units kept trying to fight back. But so much of what they’d had at the front was gone, gone forever. Also gone was the illusion they’d carried that atom bombs wouldn’t come down on them but were just for cities behind the lines.
Along with the holdouts were plenty of Russians not just willing but eager to surrender. Some of them had doses of radiation sickness; the prevailing winds carried fallout from the bomb blasts into territory the Soviet Union occupied. Others had simply had enough fighting to last them for the rest of their lives.
Most of the Ivans in their late twenties and early thirties knew bits and pieces-sometimes more than bits and pieces-of German. They would have been the ones who’d fought their way into the Reich in 1945 and then settled down to occupy it after Hitler blew his brains out and everything he’d struggled for was kaput.