Hell's Gate(3)
The man looked down at the ground, shamed, and for a moment the sergeant felt shamed himself, as if he had just shouted down his own father. Now Karasev noticed how thin the man was, even through his thick clothing. He appeared to be more a bird than a man, so recently and so horribly malnourished was he. And yet he had stiffened his spine and come voluntarily to the front lines. The sergeant bowed his own head briefly, then turned and called out to the two men who had chased down the fallen parachute. The idiots were struggling with it—and the parachute seemed to be getting the better of them.
“Bring it!” the sergeant shouted. “Clowns! What are you doing, making this your life’s work? Get back here!”
Karasev turned again toward the elderly, red-faced foot soldier and did not see the two men as they stopped struggling and sat down in the snow. Addressing the private, his tone softened. The sergeant noticed that the man’s face bore an irregular pattern of shrapnel scars that had become known as “German kisses.” He had also lost several fingers, probably to frostbite.
“Let’s go, soldier.”
But instead of falling in as ordered, the old man remained at attention. Cocking his head slightly to one side, he gave the sergeant a quizzical look.
I can’t believe this. Now what? Karasev wondered. These easterners—yellow Russians. So many dialects. “Where are the translators when you need them? Go! Go!” he said as firmly and respectfully as he could. But his words and gestures seemed futile.
The old man slowly raised his arm and pointed a trembling finger at him. The expression on his face sent a shiver down Karasev’s spine and made his knees feel suddenly loose. He looked down and noticed that a yellow film had coated his white-quilted pants and field jacket.
“What . . . ?”
Karasev sampled the gritty substance with a finger. It smells like flowers. He looked up at the sky, then at the private, whose clothing appeared to have been similarly misted. A trickle of blood ran out of the old man’s nose.
The sergeant sniffed loudly and tasted copper. His own nose was bleeding as well. He wiped at the flow with his sleeve and recoiled at the size of the red smear.
For a moment Karasev’s world went completely silent—no engines, his men no longer cursing or quarreling. It was as if someone had poured wax into his ears, so that the only sound he could hear was the rapid pounding of his own heart. Then, as quickly as the sensation had come upon him, it was gone. Karasev gave an involuntary flinch—for now his world was full of sounds.
No more than forty paces away, a horse reared up and overturned the crate-laden sled it had been pulling.
“Easy, Sasha—easy, boy!” the young sled driver cried but the animal’s eyes rolled back into its head and it let out a surprisingly human cry that startled its driver and anyone else near enough to hear. The boy tried to utter more words of comfort to his horse and was rewarded with an immense sneeze that hit him squarely in the face. As the sled driver wiped his eyes, Sergeant Karasev watched him stiffen with fear, unable to comprehend what had just occurred and unable to utter any more words.
The boy’s face and hands were covered with blood. In shock and stunned silence he stepped back, just in time to avoid being crushed by his horse as it collapsed in a red gush and the sickening wet sound of ribs snapping. Dying, the animal whipped its head back and forth—blood and pink lung tissue spraying out of its nose in great arcs.
Sergeant Karasev turned away, his eyes widening under a surge of adrenaline . . . until he saw the rest of his men, and closed his eyes. They too had started to bleed—all of them—out of their noses, from their mouths. “No!”
The roar of an engine alerted him now and he spun toward the sound. A T-34 tank veering wildly off course, throttle open. Its broad treads threw mud and blackened snow into the air. Several of Karasev’s men dove out of the way just before the war machine struck the side of the truck they’d been standing next to only a moment earlier. The tank toppled the lighter vehicle and without slowing, rode up and over the cab. In the time it took Karasev to snatch a single breath, the driver’s compartment was compressed, from roof to floor, into a space too small for anyone to fit even a hand. Within that space, the sergeant knew, the girl must have died even before she realized what was happening.
She was the lucky one.
In every direction, men were staggering and turning red, bleeding from every orifice. For many, their last voluntary movement was something they never dared do in public—their trembling fingers making the sign of the cross—forehead . . . lips . . . and breast.
Along a path five miles north and five miles south, wherever the scent of flowers had descended, snow was stealing heat from fresh-fallen blood, and melting. The field on which Sergeant Karasev stood smelled suddenly like the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Karasev’s oxygen-starved nervous system misfired, sending wave after wave of spasm through his body. The sergeant’s vascular system was degenerating into a maze of hemorrhage. Blood normally routed to the brain poured instead into his intestines, which swelled until the rising pressure blasted the hot liquid past an ineffectual muscular valve and into his stomach. He vomited an enormous quantity of blood onto his boots, then followed it down when his knees gave out.
As he lay weeping and groping at the mud, Karasev discovered that his vocal cords had slackened and that the musculature around his mouth was now numb and beyond conscious control.