Lineage(5)

A gash abruptly opened beneath the prisoner’s jaw like a red smile. Skin, esophagus, and muscle had been slit wide, and the gap continued to open, seeming that it would not stop. Blood gushed from the wound and flowed over the man’s hands in front of his eyes. Gallons seemed to escape from his throat in an elegant stream, as if poured from a pitcher. His fingers cut the flow into cascades, and he weakly began to cup the life that surged from within him.

The prisoner blinked one last time and then stumbled backward as his senses tried to maintain balance. He fell in a heap at the base of the trench behind him. His legs twitched twice as his final stores of blood escaped and ran with the grade of the earth through the wet snow.

The officer’s face split in a maniacal grin, his teeth clenched together and his blue eyes open wide to the scene before him. The lush redness of the blood on the stark white of the snow held his gaze, and he realized he could have stared for hours into the almost-black pool near his feet. A long-bladed knife that ended in a thick, chopping point extended from his right hand, and a small line of blood slid off its tip in short drops.

The people in line recoiled reflexively, as if they were made of a solid spring and a shock echoed down through their ranks. Some were screaming, while others began to cry but refused to look at the corpse in the ditch, their eyes squeezed shut, letting only tears escape. The soldiers at either end of the ditch began yelling instructions, telling them to stay where they were. The people fearfully eyed the officer, and then the muzzles of the guns that were trained on them, almost as if they were measuring each up to see which might be a better choice.

The boy’s view of the carnage had been blocked as the adults before him shifted, and thus he hadn’t seen what had transpired. Only now did he see that a man had fallen into the ditch and he seemed to be hurt.

At the far end of the line, the officer slowly came to his senses and became aware of the movement in the line of people. Without a word, he nodded again to the soldiers as he began to stalk to the next man in the line.

The officer pulled another, thinner, blade out from a sheath on his left as he strode up to a man who was in his late sixties. The man held his hands up in a defensive gesture, his long white hair flying wildly in the air, and began to plead with the officer as he approached. Without hesitation, the officer lunged forward and slid the long, thin blade up to the handle into the old man’s right eye. The eye punctured with a soft puff and deflated on the blade as the man’s body went rigid and then collapsed to the ground.

The officer marveled at how little blood escaped the man’s wound, as he stepped over the corpse and began to bear down on a woman who had fallen to her knees in the snow. In the recesses of his mind that weren’t filled with the sound of his own heart’s hammering, he began to hear gunfire.

The boy at the end of the line weaved back and forth as he tried to make out what the confusion was and why people were yelling. His mother had turned and was looking in the direction he was, with one hand clamped tightly over her mouth, as if she were about to be sick and could hold it at bay if she pushed hard enough at her face. His father was also staring at the other end of the line, and hadn’t moved a muscle until the gunshots began to cut the air with their short barks of sound. Several people tried to run out of the line, and the soldiers shot them. Their bodies fell in the snow and red began to creep outward through the white in a bright corona.

Fear began to invade the boy’s body, as his legs locked tight and he gripped his mother’s hand. She squeezed back without taking her eyes off the spectacle in front of her.

The officer wove his way down through the line in a blur of motion. His arms pinwheeled crazily at times, and snapped in short strikes at others. Blood flew in arcs and began to coat his dark uniform in splattered gore. As he cut one woman’s face from jaw to opposite eyebrow, he noticed there were many bodies falling not only in the ditch but also to the level ground on which he stood. The soldiers around him were doing well. Only the people who ran or tried to fight were shot, but most were too shocked or frightened to react. He cut these people down like wheat before a scythe.

As the officer approached a man who appeared completely dazed—his slight form hunched over and his eyes staring blankly at the ditch in front of him—the man suddenly turned with a ragged scream and began to flee. His rag-swaddled feet pounded large footprints in the snow as he ran from the pit. A soldier to the officer’s right paused as he watched the emaciated man run away, seemingly entranced by the speed at which the prisoner was escaping.