“VADIM?” A UKRAINIAN-ACCENTED voice asked from behind him. Vadim didn’t turn around immediately. He was still staring at the Fräulein.
She was red from head to toe. She’d taken multiple gunshot wounds, and in places was missing chunks of flesh. He could see human teeth marks in the wounds on her face, scraps of meat dangling from them. She was a mess. Her mouth opened and human flesh dribbled from it, an obscene red he’d seen in the aftermath of so many battles.
“Turn around slowly, hands raised. We have you covered.”
The Fräulein’s head twitched at the sound of the voice. He smelled it too, sensed it at some primal leveclass="underline" food, prey, or at least a respite for the hunger that suffused him. But he wasn’t an animal, at least not at this moment, not as he had been. He turned around slowly, but he didn’t raise his hands, nor did he drop his Stechkin.
New Boy and Princess stood in front of the blood-stained entrance to the terminal. Princess’s sniper rifle was levelled at his face. The weapon’s suppressor was screwed onto the barrel. She could not miss at this range. It would be easy, quick, an end to this non-life, an end to the hunger that gnawed at him like a beast imprisoned in his body. They were both pale and bloodstained. They looked strained and, unusually for Spetsnaz soldiers, visibly frightened. Both of them were also alive. Their blood sang to him. He could already taste their meat between his teeth. Red drool ran down his chin. He saw Princess’s finger tighten around the trigger. She was wound tight.
The city was dark, stained red by the emergency lighting from the surrounding buildings. There was no starlight, no moonlight, all of it was obscured by the ash and dust thrown into the sky by the nuclear explosions.
It took him a moment to realise that the noise behind him was the sound of teeth clacking together, a dry, breathless larynx trying to form words in defiance of biology.
“Princess…” the Fräulein finally managed from behind him. A tear ran down Princess’s cheek, but she didn’t take her eye away from her scope, the Dragunov never wavered. New Boy swallowed hard, his own rifle levelled at the Fräulein.
“What are you?” New Boy managed. There was disgust in his voice. Vadim was sure the younger man knew the answer to his own question. They all did, if they were honest, but there was a gulf between knowing and accepting.
“I do not breathe. My heart does not beat,” Vadim managed. It had taken him several attempts to make a noise that resembled speech. It felt unnatural, as though he no longer had the tools for the job. He wasn’t sure whether he was imagining it or not, but New Boy and Princess’s pulses were deafening, a beating drum between his ears. He found himself staring at Princess’s pretty neck. Imagining tearing into it with his teeth. “I want… need to eat.” He was trying to warn them. They tensed. He was surprised that neither of them fired.
“Please…” the Fräulein managed, staggering to his side. Vadim had no idea what she was asking for. Understanding? Mercy? A release? Food?
“Why can you talk?” New Boy demanded. “Why aren’t you trying to feed?” Somehow the meat talking about feeding was too much. The hunger was the only real sensation he felt, the only thing that wasn’t a muted, numbed echo of what his senses once were. The hunger was hot and red and washed over him… and he was gone.
HE HAD ONLY moved a few feet. New Boy was lying on the ground; he looked as though he’d stumbled backwards and tripped. His weapon was now pointed at Vadim, his face a mask of terror. Princess was the colour of snow under the blood spatter. He had no idea why he wasn’t dead, why she hadn’t pulled the trigger. Then he realised that someone was gripping his shoulder, tight. He looked over at the Fräulein. She was just shaking her head. He couldn’t quite believe what he’d almost done. It started to rain. The rain was gritty and black. It had been the Fräulein’s touch that had stopped him.
“Don’t fucking do that!” New Boy barked as, still covering Vadim, he scrambled to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Vadim told him. He meant it, but it sounded so hollow, so utterly pointless given the situation. “You can’t trust us.”
They heard the scraping first. The sound of metal dragged across stone. Princess moved to the side, keeping her sniper rifle levelled at him but manoeuvring for a better shot at the Fräulein. New Boy spun around, covering the entrance, broken glass crunching underfoot. Vadim could see the large figure moving towards them, but he didn’t get any sense of life. He glanced around, wondering where all the other bodies had run off to.
It was Mongol, dragging his RPKS-74 by the stock, the barrel scraping across the floor in a way that should have appalled Vadim, but such considerations were for the living. He looked good, as corpses go. He’d caught a shotgun blast to the chest, something that body armour might have saved him from. A bullet had torn open his cheek and smashed his teeth, revealing his jaw. The way he moved – stumbling, dragging his weapon behind him – it was easy to assume he was one of the mindless ones, but why wasn’t he hunting?
“That’s enough, Mongol,” New Boy told him. Mongol kept on staggering towards him. “I mean it. I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“Mongol!” the Fräulein snapped. Her voice still sounded wrong, hoarse and dry, but she was starting to sound more like herself. Mongol shuffled round to stare at the Fräulein. Dark eyes, as though from a haemorrhage. There was no spark there, no intelligence, no sign of recognition. Mongol opened his mouth, teeth bared obscenely through the torn skin. The noise he made sounded like a wounded animal. Vadim was pretty sure that it was only a matter of time before New Boy snapped and shot someone, then Princess would kill the rest.
“Your weapon!” the East German continued. Mongol looked down at the light machine gun for what seemed like a long time. Vadim waited to get a bullet in the face. Then Mongol lifted the weapon and put the sling over his head, letting it hang down, held at the ready but pointed well away from the anxious living. Vadim used the moment to holster his pistol. Mongol turned to stare at him.
“Wh…” he tried, the skin around his mouth flopping around. “Wh… What… have… we done?” he finally managed. There was something different about his eyes, now. Vadim shook his head slowly. He wasn’t sure he had a good answer for the big medic.
“Did you know?” It was Princess who asked the question. Vadim shrugged.
“We all knew it was going to be bad, but this…” he managed. He wasn’t sure if he’d even thought of such things before. It was far beyond even his experience.
“This isn’t war,” Mongol said. “This is black magic.”
He was right. Vadim had been a good Communist; he hadn’t been inside a church since before his parents were killed in the war. Their current situation belonged in the sphere of supernature. He had no frame of reference for any of this. He doubted anyone did.
“What happened?” he asked, nodding at the bloodied wreckage out the front of the train station. It was more for something to say than anything else. “I thought I saw one of them take you down.”
“After you got shot,” New Boy said, driving home to Vadim that he was dead, that he’d been killed in the tunnels below the station. “I managed to hold it off, stop it from biting me until I could stab it through the head. I heard the gunfire from Princess and Fräulein, and made my way across the tracks, through the trains, until I found them.”
“There were too many of them down there,” the Fräulein continued in her dry, rasping voice. “They were running through the carriages making more of themselves. We laid down a lot of fire, grenades, and managed to break contact, make it back up to the main concourse. But they were right behind us. Mongol…” She looked at the medic. “And Skull…”