“It will not be easy,” she had said. “He is a wizard and has many tricks. You may die. But I picked you from a list of the dead; I know for a fact that you will die if you go to fight the Germans. Kolya, you will be shot by a sniper while taking a piss. Vanya, an eighty-eight-millimeter shell will land so close to you that no part of you will be found and known to be you.”
Vanya had been troubled by a recurrent dream in which the sun came down next to him and burned him up completely. Nobody could find him, not even his mother walking the field with an icon of Jesus.
Kolya hated pissing precisely because he was terrified of snipers.
It was as though she had seen into both of their hearts.
“What about the Germans?” Vanya had said.
“Leave them to my friend Frost,” she answered. A white wolf with bony ribs moved between trees, and then Vanya was not sure he had seen it. “Russia will be Hitler’s graveyard even without you.”
“Will I be able to piss without fear? Will you promise me that I will not be shot while pissing?” Kolya asked.
She had nodded.
So they agreed and the three of them drank vodka with a drop of blood in it to seal the bargain.
The next thing they had known, they dreamed they were tiny children with rough skin, and they were hungry, so they ate mouthfuls of flesh from a man.
And then they were jumping from a hut that was actually a truck except it walked on legs.
And now they are here, together.
Shooting up into a house.
Kolya shot a strange bird that was looking at them.
Vanya thought he shot a man, had him right in his sights, squeezed the trigger patiently and felt the sweet thrill a well-placed shot produces, but the man went unharmed.
To their right, a Russian bursts into flames, screams.
To their left, an engine tries to start, then does start.
The ground rumbles.
Like an armored column passing, but harder.
“My God,” Vanya says.
Kolya points his rifle, but it seems useless in his hands.
The headlamps of a strange wrecked car have switched on in the front yard, just to their left. Another Soviet soldier they do not know had been sheltering behind a large rock near the car, firing up into the attic.
Now the car’s hood becomes a mouth.
A steer’s iron mouth.
The soldier jumps back, startled.
Quick, like a fox eating a mouse, the car clamps down on the man, crushing him.
The car becomes the head of a giant made of tree, tree roots, boulders, and other cars.
This giant grows horns.
Bull’s horns.
It is a man of metal. Stone and wood with a huge longhorn’s skull made of iron.
Headlamps for eyes.
It rips itself out of the ground, leaving a hole the size of a small basement.
Raining dirt and small rocks.
A rusty truck splits itself into pieces, becomes armor plating.
A Greek hoplite’s armor, greaves, abdomen plate, armored skirt and all, wraps in two seconds around the body of wood and stone and steel.
The man still dangles from its mouth.
It spits him out.
It is as tall as the house.
What lands on the yard is not a man, but a lifeless doll.
No bigger than a cat.
Buttons for eyes.
105
“Jesus Christ,” Andrew says, the headlamps level with the attic, sweeping the attic with light. “It’s fucking Buttercup.”
“Yep,” Michael Rudnick says, grinning.
He stops grinning as they watch the Soviet soldier fall from the bull’s mouth, his neck on wrong.
I drove that car into a tree with Sarah in it.
Drunk I’m worthless I should die.
Stop it!
Focus!
You’re a warlock now.
Look what you made!
You have to stop the witch.
Save Anneke.
Andrew says, “Buttercup.”
It looks at him, robes him in light.
“Kill the soldiers. Break the hut’s legs.”
The lights sweep off, illuminating snowflakes as the minotaur heads for the tree line, the ground shaking at its steps.
106
Vanya shoots it, shoots one of its headlamps out, but it keeps coming. It bends for a log. It sees Kolya frozen in fear, quite near it. Squashes him with the log as easily as a man would kill a toad, squashes him down into the soil. Kolya is gone entirely. Vanya runs into thick forest, away from the giant.
Something trips him.
The tail of a dragon?
Attached to a vacuum cleaner?
Now a brass-and-metal beaked head turns to look at him, great black wings spreading.
He tries to point his rifle, but its eyes flash.
I’m burning!
The pain is immeasurable.
Then he isn’t burning.
He’s running through a field of sunflowers, running at a German artillery position.
A cacophony of noise around him, but he feels great relief.
It’s so good not to be burning that he laughs, still running.
Then he hears the whine.
An eighty-eight-millimeter shell drawing nearer.
It’s coming for me, right at me!
He flings himself to the ground.
Still the whine grows louder.
He knows it will land almost on him, seems to see the shadow of it growing on the spot exactly near his head where it will punch into soil and sunflowers and explode.
He will be mixed with sunflowers.
Time for one last thought.
Sunflowers. This isn’t so bad.
Kolya huddles, mad with fear, when the giant bull comes for him.
It raises its huge tree trunk.
It’s going to crush me! Help! Help!
But then he isn’t in a snowy yard outside a rich man’s house getting crushed by a giant bull-man.
Now he is standing, wiener in hand, urinating on a low stone wall near a collapsed farmhouse.
“Ah,” he says, relieved to feel his bladder emptying.
Relaxed.
Suddenly Kolya feels pressure in his head, massive pressure.
Can’t see anymore.
Hears the rifle’s crack.
Ow!
Sniper!
Kolya feels himself falling in a muted way, as if someone else is falling.
He hears his friends returning fire into the tree line.
A mile away and receding.
He manages to say one last sentence.
“This bitch lies.”
107
Andrew scoots to the other end of the attic, risks a peek.
The minotaur has crossed behind the house, drawing rifle fire from the soldiers on the west side. A grenade lands near it and goes off, blowing off part of one greave, causing it to bleed oil and limp. But it knocks down trees and bellows, flushing the soldier who threw the grenade so the vacuum-cockatrice flies down on him. Its fire magic is exhausted, but it grabs him with its chimp arms and flies him into a tree until his head caves in and he, too, reverts into a lifeless burlap doll.
Exhausted, Electra collapses next to the doll and lies still.
Now Buttercup sweeps its remaining headlight over the backyard again, letting its light fall on a tractor.
As soon as the beam hits it, the tractor changes into the hut on chicken legs.